The Witch's Heart
by StarNymphe
Summary: "There once was a girl without a heart and a boy who drank starlight to keep the nightmares at bay–and they met, as stories often begin, in the dark of the forest…" A fairytale AU about a Knight, a Witch, and the questionable deals they make along the way.
1. The Boy

**_Summary:_**

_"There once was a girl without a heart and a boy who drank starlight to keep the nightmares at bay–and they met, as stories often begin, in the dark of the forest…"_

As a Knight of the Inquisition, Ser Cullen is no stranger to the horrors which linger in the dark woods. While tracking a dangerous lindworm for the Inquisition in the depths of the forest, Cullen is injured and lost within the tainted memories of his past. He awakens in the realm of the Birch Wood Witch–a strange elven woman who guides the lost through her realm. Desperate and falling victim to his addiction, Cullen makes a deal with her, signing away pieces of himself in exchange for another dose of lyrium–or Starlight as she calls it. But with each return to her wood, Cullen finds himself drawn to something more than the temptation of the song in his mind…

* * *

**Part I- The Boy**

There had never been a knight born of Honnleath and, as most _would_ likely tell you, there never would be one; believing otherwise was the stuff of whimsical nonsense. Their village was no origin story for heroes or future queens but the place where farmers, merchants, and smiths were born, were raised, were taught, and would die—and then so on and so forth. Magic lingered not in their grass nor in the wells. Perhaps if there had been a magician to terrorize them or a slightly unfair baron, they might have had a chance for a child to be born of heroic destiny—but as it turned out, the baron who ruled was quite the pleasant fellow and magicians didn't find reason to come by less to heal an ill child or show off their skills in a nightly show or two before going on their way with their traveling band.

Even the forest, which swelled with its own ancient power, felt harmless at the best of times. This was, of course, a trick as anyone would tell you a forest is a forest no matter how calm—in fact, the calmness was what made it so very troubling.

But Cullen didn't care much about that—or about witches and barons, magic or queens, or what is or what was in Honnleath. What he cared about was what he wanted and what he wanted most was to be a Knight.

The greatest knight in all of Fereldan—brave and righteous, protector to the masses, a force no sorceress nor dragon nor demon could ever hope to defeat. He built his swords of wood and string and wrote down his holy oaths instead of doing his work. And his mother and father would let him in spite of knowing he would never get far, for they were long from the capital and even if their son had the heart of a warrior, who would see him all the way out here in their peaceful and quite plain little village?

Nevertheless, Cullen believed and Mia believed and Branson _somewhat_ believed, and that was enough.

Trouble was he was a slight boy, clumsy on his feet with ears much too big for his head, not the sort of herald child who one heard about in tales, and he supposed that's why he was laughed at so often by the other children and those lazy apprentices who hung around at their master's stalls and did nothing but bully.

It was a riot for them to watch the cattle farmer's eldest son get all in a tizzy— "Look it,", they'd jab a finger at him and say, "he's getting all puffed up again! Looks like a wet pissed off cat, he does!" Then they'd take their stones and fling them at Cullen's head and no matter what he did, no matter how hard he yelled that he was going to become the greatest knight and crush them, they always seemed to win and he'd end up down in the mud, blood and tears soaking his face.

Mia told him once to not let them get to him. "All of 'em are tryin' to make up for their faces. You see Jeremy's—he's got so many spots like he's got somethin' catching. Ugly, gross bunch o'mutts." She dabbed a wet rag under his bloody nose and tsked, "So what if you puff up? I hear lions puff up too. So be a lion and bite down on one of their heads! Send them screaming, yeah?"

Cullen beamed at her with his swollen lips, "Yeah!"

He swore to keep that in mind the next time he got into a tussle with the bunch—and when he lost that battle, he said he'd keep it in mind the time after that, then when he lost that fight, he'd think about it next time…and so and so forth during the next sixteen fights—all of which he lost.

He kept that in mind as he walked past the stalls, towards the gate to the outside of the town where his home stood just beyond a few hills and felt the eyes of his tormentors on his back.

Lion, he was going to be a lion. Bite their heads clean off.

"Oi! Ain't it Ser Cully the Honorable? Too good for us today, are ya?"

Lion. He'd be a lion…

"No one to save then? Or ya running scared?"

He set his jaw and then sighed.

_Another day_… is what he told himself. Grunting, he heaved the bag of wheat higher on his shoulder and in the other hand he held Rosalie's little fingers tight. His sister trailed on behind him whining, every so often stepping on the back of his shoes when she hurried along and tried to match his stride.

"'Len!" She tugged on his sleeve and pointed behind her, "They're talkin' ta ya!"

Doing his best to keep his eyes in front of him, Cullen squeezed her hand and bit out, "Rosie, comm'on. I promised Mama I'd get you back before dark. She doesn't like you out this far."

"Buuuut they're _tryin'_ ta talk ta ya!"

Usually, he didn't even take her into town if he could help it. Love her to death but Rosie was trouble to deal with in large places; somehow she always got lost or stuck somewhere or one time she ended up in a barrel full of fish that was marked for delivery to Elmridge (and Branson would have let her stay in there for two pieces of silver if Cullen hadn't beat him upside his head). But she had been relentless in her insistence, too much so for Cullen's thin patience really. Father had bestowed on her the first real coin she had ever earned and she was determined to buy this silly ruby bracelet at one of the stalls while he did his chores—and Mother had left the decision up to him, unwilling as she was to deal with her youngest's high pitched tantrum.

Cullen, if only for sanity's sake, had given her a firm 'no' but Rosalie had nearly destroyed his eardrums with her scream so for all intents and purposes, she had won.

Thus Cullen had two issues at hand: getting Rosalie home safe and sound—or at the very least up this blighted hill which she repeatedly kept tripping on—and getting away from the gaggle of fools currently jeering and hot on his heels.

"Ser Cully! Don't ya have time ta talk ta us?" One of them shouted at him.

A 'whoosh' streamed past his ear and Cullen realized, with his blood boiling, that one of these fools had sent a rock sailing at his head, luckily missing his cheek by just an inch.

That could have hit _Rosie_.

It took a lot of his restraint not to spin around and hurl himself screeching at the group as he usually did, but the risk to his sister was far too great. He squeezed Rosalie's hand again, bit down on the inside of his cheek until he tasted copper, and then started to yank her in front of him. If they were going to start chucking rocks, then he had to get between her and them before they really did smack her with something.

Thing was, Rosie was not budging—every pull he gave was met with resistance, her hand trying to wiggle out of his grasp, and he knew right then and there that this wouldn't end well.

"Nah, can't ya see he has his princess with him today? Good Knight he is, escortin' her and all."

A swell of laughter sounded from the four boys as Cullen's cheeks warmed with both humiliation and fury. He tried once again to move his sister but Rosalie shrugged him off and he had to watch, sort of distressed and sort of impressed, as she swooped down, picked up a rock, and chucked it at one of the boys.

_Right _between the eyes.

Oh, Maker—she got his temper and Branson's good aim. Mia was going to get a kick out of this if he managed to get them back in one piece.

His sister, however, had other plans.

"Shut yer dirty mouths!" Rosalie yelled as she stomped her feet and kicked up dust. "'Len's the best knight in the whole wide world! He'd make ya cry, I say! Yer just jealous!" With all the gall she had in that tiny body, she proceeded to hook her thumbs in the corners of her mouth, stretch them far apart, and stick her tongue out with a _'nyaaah'_.

Great, she had Mia's nerve to boot _and_ zero of the wit to get them out of this.

The silence that blew through them was certainly a welcomed outcome, though whether the boys were stricken speechless out of awe or rage, Cullen wouldn't wait to find out. Dumping the bag of wheat, he took hold of the girl around the chest and picked her up, "Rosie shuttup!" but he struggled—at six years old, she was getting harder to carry and with her kicking madly, it was making it damn near impossible. "We gotta _go_!"

"No—lemme take'em if you won't!"

No longer slack-jawed, wide-eyed, or rendered dumbstruck by the child's brazenness, the group of boys was advancing toward them again. The one Rosie had hit, Mal, clapped a hand over his bleeding face, scowling and wincing at the same time. "Oy, so yer knight's that tough, eh little princess?" He asked, taking hold of one of Rosalie's flailing arms.

Rosalie kicked him square in the stomach and countered, "Better than any o'you!"

"You—soddin' lil! I'm gonna—!"

Cullen spun around with her, yanking her out of the boy's grasp. "Don't touch her!" He roared as he put Rosalie down behind him and faced the boys with the best scowl he could muster, his fists balled in front of him and ready to go.

Lion. He was going to be a lion.

"Ha, there he goes again!" Jeremy pointed at him, "Look at his hair. Puffed up like a cloud, he is! Bet he's soft ta punch like one!"

Mal's lips curled, "Oh, doubt it. Good Ser Cullen's made outta brimstone and steel like any knight worth his salt. Wanna see?"

He lunged forward and clocked the side of Cullen's face. He heard Rosalie scream in fright as he stumbled and his knees hit the ground. The thing about Cullen, though, was that he was scrappy and quite stubbornly—stupidly so, some might say—so when Mal's leg came down to kick him, Cullen opened his arms and hugged it to his chest with an animalistic snarl.

Mal hopped up and down off, trying to shake him off. "E-ey! Son of BITCH—lettgo!"

Cullen did, but only so he could throw his body at Mal's and send them both down into the dirt. There were arms and legs everywhere, fingers in noses, nails in eyes, someone trying to get his hand around the others neck, pulling hair to make one of them yelp in a thoroughly embarrassing way—they rolled around across the dirt path until Cullen socked the other boy's nose and wrestled his way on top.

_Be a lion_, he told himself, _bite his head clean off._

Cullen lifted his fist high above his head and readied to smash it right into Mal's obnoxious mouth when Rosalie yelled out again.

"No! Give it! Give it to me!"

Cullen turned his head to find his baby sister jumping up and down, her dress covered in filth and her knees scraped and bloody, as she tried to snatch her bracelet out of Jeremy's hand. The tears splashing down her flushed face only egged the three teenagers on; they howled and danced around her, tossing the bracelet to the other when she got too close.

"Princess! Lil'Princess! Here! Come on now—ya can do better than that!"

"Reach higher! Higher—hahaha—Higher!"

Cullen watched as Rosie jumped as high as she could and one of the boy's tripped her. With a squeal, the little girl plummeted into the dirt and cried out in pain.

Cullen saw red.

"I'm going to kill you!" He suddenly shrieked at the top of his lungs and bolted at Jeremy's head first. This righteous outburst was nothing new for him—this was, in fact, what they probably wanted out of him. Indeed, his reaction only made the teenagers laugh even harder as they stepped out of his way, waving the bracelet over his head and watching him run forward and nearly ram his head into a tree like an enraged, blinded bull.

"Oi, throw it here!" Mal exclaimed, up on his feet and smiling even as the blood from his nose drizzled down his lips, coating his yellow teeth in thick black-red. One of the boys tossed it to him and Cullen swerved around to face him.

"Give it back!" He demanded.

Mal twirled the bracelet around his index finger, "Come and get it, Ser Cully." For one second, the two's eyes met—Cullen's flashing with malice and Mal's dark with cruel mirth—and then in the next, Mal was running off up the hill and Cullen was chasing after him as fast as he could. He was going to get him. He was going to kill him. He was going to take his head, shove it into the mud, make him eat the shit he spews, and then bite down on his neck and—

The forest was ahead.

Like a thousand agonized clawing hands, it reached and scratched at the blue sky as if trying to tear it all down and leak its darkness out. Shadows lingered between the leaves and wood in forests; this place where reality existed and yet didn't, sliced to bits by the olden dark magic that inhabited in the plants, under the ground, in the bones of the immortal beasts that dwelled always in between the pockets of light. It loomed over them and its eyes, where ever those eyes may be, bore into these flimsy human children that had no business in its walls.

One step over its line and it could swallow them both whole—erase them from the minds of their families, dash their very footprints from the earth until no one could even imagine what they might've sounded like. Why? No reason; anyone who put logic to a forest was mad and if not, surely they would become mad thinking on it too long.

But Cullen didn't feel madness when he approached the tall black lines across the sky, calling at Mal to stop. All he felt was an ancient fear and one that drained the blood from his face until he was a ghost of himself as he watched Mal draw his arm back and fling the bracelet into the darkness. The gleam of its rubies caught the sun's light in an instant. Then it was eaten entirely and where it had gone, Cullen could not hope to see.

His feet came to a stop right at the edge of the trees and refused to go forward, frozen to the spot.

Mal threw his head back with a laugh but for all its humor it could not hide the way his voice quaked. "T-try and catch that!" He taunted as he backed away with feeble awkward legs and ran past the boy—and, perhaps, if Cullen hadn't been so paralyzed by the hundreds of nonexistent eyes ripping into him, he might've turned with him and tried to cobbler the teenager.

As it stood, if there had ever been a wrathful lion in him it had escaped out of the cage of his heart and left him a coward frightened by the dark.

A hiccup, strangled by sobs and spit, roused him enough to look behind him. Rosalie had made her way after him making the most heart wrenching of sounds; from her legs to the front of her dress to her hands and face, she was stained with mud, grass, and her own overflowing tears. Her entire body trembled from the strength of her cries, her tears welling up so much in her gray eyes that it was even a wonder she could see him, much less walk.

Oh, and her knees. The skin has been ripped right off, revealing angry, raw red underneath. Despite the bruises on his own face, Cullen flinched and felt the painful lurch of shame and regret in the pit of his stomach. He bent down to her height and whispered, "Oh. Oh, Rosie. I, I'm so sorry. Please don't…don't cry…" Cullen cautiously gathered her up in his arms and shushed her, letting her nuzzle her face into his neck and get snot all over his shirt.

"M-m-m-m-mmmmy brrrracelet! T-t-t-th—they t-took it!" Rattling gasps came between each of her words.

"I know, I know…" He used the tattered edge of his sleeve to wipe her tears away but it helped none, instead smearing the dirt and tears all over her rosy cheeks. "I know you worked hard for it. I'm sorry, Rosie."

She wept on, her small body jumping in his hands with every shattering cry that erupted from her throat. It broke Cullen's heart into little pieces. He was her big brother; he was supposed to protect her and what did he go on and do? Make her cry. Some 'knight' he was.

He could hear the boys laughing at them over the hill.

Cullen frowned and narrowed his eyes. "Don't worry. I'll make it better…I'll…I'll…" It would have been sensible for him to say he'd buy her a new one—a better one, made of real gold and dazzled with more gems than she could count—but as the boy racked his brain for an answer, sensibility did not appear to be at the forefront of his thoughts. "…I'll go and get it back for you."

Rosalie tensed up in his arms as he pecked her reassuringly on the forehead and stood up. He didn't risk a glance back at her face for he feared that if he did he would lose this spur of courage. Rather he gulped down hard on the drumming of his heart in his throat and squeezed his eyes tight as he took a cautious step toward the forest's mouth. A cold gust of wind went through him and it made him think that the very mouth of the woods was breathing down upon him, its jaw unhinging to draw him deep within.

_Be a lion._

He opened his eyes and glared into the tangled shadows. "Stay here. I'll be right back." He said as he inhaled sharply through the nose and walked past the chorus of black wood trees. The first step over the bushel of dead leaves and twigs was the hardest, the second stiff and noisy with caution, the third much less so, and the fourth the reckless stride of bravery taking hold. It was a victory, to say the least, that the boy managed past the first of the trees without being whisk away by a giggling fae but that was because he was ever so watchful of what he touched upon, recalling once how his mother told him to be wary of fairy rings hidden under the brush.

Anything could be anywhere and anything that lived in a forest cared not about how noble he might be—only how fun it would be to play with his skin, voice, and bones.

When he brushed his hand on the trunk of a tree as he passed, he tried not to think about feeling something akin to the beating of the drum or, worse, the thump of a heart against his palm.

_Snap!_

A stick snapped under the slow pressure of his foot and he was so startled by it that it almost had the boy announcing his presence across the entire woods with a gurgled yelp but he clamped his mouth shut with both his lips and hands and kept on with his search. Wide darting eyes scanned the forest floor but he neither saw the shimmer of the gold nor the spark of red between the foliage. Stupid Mal had an impressive arm and Cullen cursed him for it—you would have thought (and Cullen hoped) someone as lazy as the _tailor's_ apprentice would barely have the strength to fling anything this far. The farther Cullen went, the farther the day's light waned, and the dimmer it got, the harder Cullen's blood rushed through his limbs and into his chest. His legs were unsteady underneath him and he feared they might take on a life of their own and take him right back to the valley, hands empty and face covered in shame. No one would blame him for turning back, he knew, but could Cullen live with it? Could he look himself in the mirror if he turned tail and ran after he had given his word otherwise?

The answer was a bad taste in his mouth and so the boy walked on with a grunt, ushered on by the same irrational pride that many men before him had died for.

As he went on, Cullen spotted something long near him. A stick or, rather, maybe an almost branch that was far too slender to stay up in its tree. It had been snapped off at the end, smaller branches producing out of its long length. It was near as long as his body and reminded him of the swords Mia would tie together for their mock battles, the prize always a hug from Rosalie. "Yes!" whispered Cullen as he picked the stick up and extended it out in front of him. "You'll do nicely in a fight for sure." There was a tone of encouragement in his voice and it was a wonder if he was saying that to his makeshift weapon or himself. He swung it about him thrice and, when it didn't snap in two, nodded in approval. Yes, it will definitely do.

A knight is not a knight if he has nothing to fight for _or_ with.

Awkwardly, he tried shoving the stick into his belt like a sword in its sheath, but when he found he had no grace to walk with such a thing, he kept it firmly in his hand and went on his way. Standing a little taller now, he kept looking across the forest floor for the bracelet, tapping the floor and trees with the stick as he did, feeling as though that maybe this wasn't so bad. As he came to a grouping of rocks, clustered together from small to larger boulders that loomed almost as high as some trees and festooned in vibrate green moss, Cullen caught the glitter of ruby red in a patch of grass at the base. His eyes shined with excitement at it as he picked it up, a triumphant wide grin spreading across his face at it.

He did it! He braved the place no one else would dare go _alone_. He couldn't wait to get back and show Rosalie what he had done just for her—and see the look on those nitwit's faces when he came back victorious. Talk about being a good knight.

As he pocketed the bracelet, Cullen heard the gentle crunching of leaves behind him, "L-L-Len…" came his sister's tiny, choking voice. His body went cold. No. No. No. _No._ Not good. Cullen turned around, praying that the forest was playing tricks on his ears and he just needed to stay calm—but no.

No, there was Rosalie a way behind him, hands bunched up on the front of her blouse as she shook like a leaf.

Cullen, infuriated by her bullheaded disobedience, didn't notice how she wasn't looking at him, "Rosie! I told you to stay put until…until…" and then he _did _but only because he heard the bone-chilling snort first.

He had only ever seen a wild boar a few times in his life and it was always at a safe distance. In his memories, they seemed smaller to him—mangled, mud-caked beasts that rose chaos in the cattle's meadows as Father and his uncles chased them far from their homes with a couple of axes and torches. Mother told him to stay behind the fence when they showed up_—'Little thing like you they'll trample right on top of. We'll find you mashed like a couple of potatoes and have to serve ya up for dinner, we will'_. She joked and playfully bit at him, making the whole concept of a wild boar appear harmless.

There was nothing 'harmless' about this creature now as it strode between the trees and into the speckled light with threatening ownership of the dirt the two children stood upon. It was gigantic, taller than the two of them, fatter than the meatiest of Father's cows—its black, matted fur spiked up at all angles threaded through with mud, with flies, with excrement, with brownish dried _blood_. It wore its mangy skin as a crown for them to be awed by and when it opened its mouth, all Cullen could see were its crooked blunt teeth jutted up and out, coated by oozing black salvia and licked along by a pink tongue. Its eyes were pitch black and still, _somehow_, they glowed in the low sunlight.

Amidst the two of them it stepped, its head turning from right to left, and then the wild boar let out a blood-curdling squeal that plummeted into the very marrow of Cullen's bones. Mouth and throat sucked dry by his terror, the boy could only think _Maker, Maker, Maker please don't send me to die. Not by this._

Trying not to breath, he dared a glimpse back at Rosalie. Too frightened to cry, she had brought her hands up to her mouth in an attempt to stifle her whimpers while her wide eyes remained fixated on the beast and nothing else. The two of them watched stiffly as the wild boar sniffed the air around it, waiting on what it might do and hoping against any other logic that it might leave them be.

_Snap!_

The blood from Rosalie's face drained right out of her as three sets of eyes focused in on the stick underneath the girl's foot, snapped in two when she had taken an involuntary step back. "A…a…a-ah…" was all Rosalie could muster to say as she lifted her foot up and saw that the wild boar was staring right at her, truly seeing her there for the first time. It flared its nostrils and gurgled lowly, bending its head down for the charge. Rosalie stumbled backward clumsily, looking between the beast and Cullen's ashen face, her voice choking out only "a..aahh…aaa!" as the boar kicked its cloves against the ground and snarled at her in its outrage, though what she had done that was so offensive no one would ever be able to guess.

"Hey! Look here!"

It had been a screaming thought that had thrown the stone out of Cullen's hand and into the wild boar's arse, a muscle deep instinct to _protect_. There was a piece of him still that could barely believe he had just done that as the hog froze abruptly and turned its burning glaze onto the boy. Cullen growled right back at the creature, baring his teeth with the tenacity of a predator; perhaps not covered in blood and gunk and dulled down to a painful blunt point as the boar's, but still he showed them.

He looked at Rosalie and screamed, "Run now! _Go_!"

"B-b-but Len—!"

"I SAID _**GO**_, ROSALIE!"

His bark shocked the girl enough into some sense and, without so much of a sound, turned tail and ran as fast as she could. It was not as if the boar cared much for her, though; body heaving with its wrath, it tore holes through the boy's chest and released a pitched howl with a crack of its wide gullet, spraying its dribble everywhere. Cullen stared at the black abyss inside its mouth with big, almost fascinated eyes and then he brought out the stick in front of him, holding it by its length with two steady hands while his heart beat rapidly against his rib cage, telling him to fight on.

_Lion_, he chanted to himself, _be a lion_.

Despite it all, his teeth chattered against each other when he spoke, "C-come now. I…I ain't scared of you!"

Whether this was true or not, the wild boar didn't appear to give a flying nug about it. It squealed and stalked slowly towards the boy, huffing as it bowed its and aimed its protruding fags towards his gut. Cullen tried to keep his ground and held the stick tighter, pointing it at the boar's snout like a sharpened blade, but he couldn't help it. He stepped back and the boar kept coming and when Cullen cried out in a mixture of daft bravery and distress and swung the stick at it as violently as he could, the boar only needed to open its mouth and chop down on it to tear it from the boy's hand. Empty handed as he was, Cullen could only try to dash away from the beast before it charged into him—but it was far too late. As Cullen spun around to blindly run away, he found himself face to face with the unkind cluster of rocks and nowhere else to go.

Seized suddenly by the icy grip of dread, Cullen's only thought was a pray that the Maker or Blessed Bride wouldn't let the last of himself be smeared across these stones like some grotesque painting left out as a warning for other foolhardy boys. Unhinging its mouth to the observing eyes of the forest, the wild boar shrieked out as if striking all noise from the world and then charged toward the boy. Cullen, pressed flat against the rocks, felt a hot tear trail down from the corner of his eye as he brought his arms up to his face in a lame attempt to protect himself one last time.

What came next was the hastened sound of blade hushing through skin and bone, the finality of the wild boar's maddened squeak, and the great hot gush of blood from a deep wound. Through the linen of his sleeves, he could see the gleam of the holiest of white—steel of a sword doused in the red of a beast and brightened by its glory. It hardly bothered him at all that his arms and legs were splattered with specks of the animals, for when Cullen hazard looking over his arms, he saw before him a sight from his dreams.

A woman stood over him with her fingers wrapped around the hilt of the sword, of which that had stabbed the boar so powerfully, it crushed through its skull and plunged straight into its body until it found home in the ground underneath. Though she was clad in damaged armor and wrapped in the journey-worn shroud of the richest red and the sunburst of gold, everything about her engulfed Cullen in a sense of reverence—for her eyes were such a strike of blue that the sky seemed pale to it and her hair—_Maker, her hair_—was a halo of feathered blonde around her head, a blaze of heaven he could only imagine on someone else. On the figure of Andraste in the stain glass windows of the Chantry with her blessed crown the beacon of all light and her sword the only justice.

He had a traitor thought, then, that _No. No, this wasn't Andraste._ Looking at her was something better because she was here and everything his heart had ever called out to _be_.

_Maker_, Cullen saw that kingdom of Kirkwall's insignia on her armor, _she's a knight_.

This woman fixed him with an unreadable expression as she mercilessly pulled her sword from the boar's corpse. "Can you stand, boy?" She asked.

Cullen could only think to nod and snap his mouth shut. He got onto his feet as quickly as he could, refusing to look directly at the still twitching carcass, its black eyes staring up at him. The woman took no care to check for his injuries; barely, she acknowledged that he was well enough to stand and then inclined with a flick of her head for him to follow. "Good. Come now. This is a wicked place." A flash of a sneer graced her features as she swiftly turned and sheathed her sword, her cloak a swaying river of blood behind her. For a moment Cullen stood there paralyzed, caught in the current of this woman's presence and drinking it to his brim, and then he was blinking into her light and tripping after her, questions on his tongue and yet he was too struck to ask any of them.

Without any more of a word to him, the woman guided Cullen back to the mouth of the forest as if she knew the invisible path by heart. Light assaulted his vision as he came through from the shadows and after that a body with fluttering golden hair came at him faster than the boar had and nearly sent him flying back to the shaded ground of the woods.

Rosalie wailed and tug at the front of his shirt, "Len! Len, you came back! Oh, I thought—I…I…wasn't gonna…" The thought overpowered her and she succumbed to a new flood of tears that splashed both him and her. Cullen could only shush her as he gathered her in his embrace, rubbing his cheek against the top of her head. It was plush, soft, smelled of flowers and oils and it was then that Cullen realized that he had almost died.

Really, truly, absolutely almost **died**.

If he had died, he'd never feel how soft his sister was again. He would have missed this and the sun in his eye and those stupid apprentices standing at the hill still, dumbfounded by his reappearance—and—

Cullen looked up and saw the woman standing in front of them with a disgruntled expression, her lips a grime flat line across her pale face and her eyebrows furrowed together as if unsure of what she was exactly seeing in him. Her eyes held the iridescence of a river under a tree's shadow and he was swimming on them, everything he was and would be playing out in the water's reflection.

He wondered if she was impressed by any part of him.

"Tell me, boy, was my saving you worth my time?" asked the woman, her hands resting on her sword's hilt.

Cullen blinked at her owlishly, "What?"

"Were you worth it or have I simply stalled the inevitable death of a fool who treads where madmen know not to go." The sternness of her voice felt like a slap across his face and Cullen's cheeks warmed at it. She narrowed her eyes, "Do you believe yourself bold for facing the dark? The first of few who went against demon and beast alike and lived?"

He glared at the ground and said, "I…I did not go there to be bold, Ser…"

She paused. Then, "Why did you go?"

He regarded her from underneath his eyebrows and sucked on the inside of his cheek. Fishing around in his pocket, he took out the ruby bracelet, covered in dirt but no less ruined, and showed it to the woman. Gently, he slid it onto Rosalie's wrist and locked the latch so it wouldn't fall off. The smile that bloomed on his sister's face brought out one to his own as he turned back to the woman.

The action seemed to perplex her. "A trinket? You expose yourself to the poison of the woods for that?"

"It was important to her," He explained with a shrug, "so it is important to me."

"I doubt the cheap piece of jewelry would have been more important than your life in exchange."

"You're right but I would not have died for it. I would have died for her. Isn't protecting others the purpose of a Knight?" asked Cullen and he found his words to be the most earnest they have ever been. That this truth, this desire to protect, was as much a part of him as his hair or eyes or heart. He stood firmly with his arm around Rosalie's shoulders and watched as something flickered across the woman's face. Recognition.

"What is your name, boy?" asked the woman.

Cullen puffed out his chest and answered proudly, "Cullen Rutherford, Ser."

From the huddled group behind them they heard the snickers, the jeering of his name, for Rutherford was a peasant name—the watcher of cattle, the no one and nothing of the world who lived and disappeared without making a single footnote in history. The unimportant and the unimpressive. And Cullen's face warmed and his eyes flared and his hair puffed out in all his outrage as he roared back at them, "Shut up! It's a _good_ name!"

But those apprentices laughed on because, in the end, they were right. He was born of naught and would die of naught.

It was only the slight turn of the woman's head, the glare underneath the wave of light blonde hair, that caused the boys to stop their tittering and do so as if the air in their lungs had been cut off, for they feared a single twitch from her more than even a ripping screech from the woods. "Take no heed of those who stand idly by and cower as children go off to die." She said quietly as her gaze fell upon Cullen once more. She tilted her head a tad, her eyebrow quirking up in question, "Though I wonder what has more worth: the fool kin of a cattle farmer who dies for his sister's trinket or the cowards who goad him into doing so and cry at his demise?"

It was the singing of her steel that he heard first and only vaguely did he realize that the sword had been released, that its tip was under his chin, that she was pointing it at his throat and that her face hadn't changed, that she was looking at him evenly as the apprentices scattered away like a pack of panicked birds and Rosalie squealed and hung onto him tighter.

"Do you know the answer?" asked the woman.

Cullen didn't move and didn't breathe, but raised his eyes to hers and held them there without blinking. It would surprise him later that he didn't feel even a tinge of fright but, rather, curiosity; a need to know everything about this woman and the world she came from.

And so, he asked: "What is your name, Ser?"

The woman blinked first and frowned, "Pardon?"

He swallowed, peeking down at the blade, praying for more strength, and then looked to her again, "You asked my name and I gave it. It is only proper you return the gesture, so…what is your name?"

The woman was silent and then she took the sword for Cullen's neck, "Ser Meredith Stannard, Knight of Kirkwall." She returned her sword to its sheath and let it hang from the belt as she looked at the sky, which was dwindling from a brilliant blue to softer lavender, the sun edging slowly to the horizon which would soon be its bed. "You dropped something before you came this far, didn't you? A bag. Collect it, if it's still there, and take your sister's hand. I will escort you two home and speak with your mother."

"What? Why?" Cullen stared at her in alarm, not at all keen on letting his mother know what idiotic nonsense he had gotten into this time.

But the woman only moved away from him with the sway of her bloody cape and began walking with only this to say, "You said your name was a good name. I want to see _how_ good you intend it to be."

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Wow, so yeah, guess this is happening now. I hope you like a fairytale au where the author doesn't know what she's doing because that's what you're getting here. Heads up, things are going to be a little dark for a while and will involve exploring things like PTSD, drug addiction, implied assault, the abuse of a child on the autistic spectrum, and other wonderful stuff. If you're triggered or hurt by any of this, please know that it was not my intention and I am deeply sorry. Also if I veer off character personality, I'm sorry about that too. I'm trying my best, my dudes.

Oh, and thank you to adventuresinastrangeworld for coming up with the fic title!

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this story, even if it drags on in places. If you have any comments or helpful tips please feel free to write something. I'll definitely appreciate the feedback! Thank you for reading!


	2. The Girl

**Disclaimer:** this chapter involves the abuse, both physical and emotional, of a child with Asperger's Syndrome/on the Autism spectrum by a parent. The phrases, words, and names used by the parent, as well the mind set the parent has, is not one shared by the author. I tried my best to write what goes down with as much respect towards the subject as possible and to the best of my ability–if you are triggered or hurt by any of this, then I am deeply sorry as that was not my intention.

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**Part II- The Girl **

All she saw from her window were the tops of the trees, yet she knew her lands were beautiful. It was second-hand information, of course, told by word-of-mouth, through pictures in her books, in the streams of ethereal images that the Lady Deshanna manifested from her hand, and, most importantly, because Papae _told _her so.

Indeed, the realm of Lavellan's held its own against the likes of Arlathan's hallowed halls. Cities of interwoven simmering summer stone and mighty birch tree palaces with their stunning onyx carved statues which breathed and danced in the street along lit orbs of pink and red, blue and green, gold and silver hues. It was a place of light, so bright the magic that it was impossible to find a single shadow. Holy; a sight to behold in the sunlight. In their infinite wisdom, the Kings and Queens of the realm came to the highest of all the mountains and with their own hands constructed one hundred temples of platinum and oak in the name of the Evanuris' above—engraved with their treasures, blessed with their own blood, the brilliance of their magic running through the veins and making the ornate stones unbreakable.

The Greatest of All Gifts it was called and the world knew it to be so. Arlathan may have been the center point of Elvhenan but Lavellan was the most faithful of its lands—the Evanuris' most obedient children.

She had never seen any of it. Not a glimpse of those spun spires crowned with runes of ice nor the clear crystal paths that burst with starlight at a single touch. Even the mountain, so beloved as it loomed across the realm, could only be recalled as a backdrop of a fleeting memory of a toddling babe wandering after her laughing parents, trying to catch their sounds in the palm of her hands. It was a pity that the only window she had faced away from the cities but it was just as well in the end. She preferred the vastness of the forest that enveloped her family's estate, its untamed magic whispering in the wind which played with her hair. Those cities, those temples; in them held people who observed her for too long, demanding something of her that she did not have with their hungry and curious eyes. It was not wise for her to be seen and, indeed, if she was, she would clap her hands over her eyes to hide from the terror their attention brought.

For you see, Eurydice had no heart in her chest, no brain in her head, no soul in her eyes; she had been broken in the mind from the day she came out of her mother's womb.

This is what Papae said and she believed his every word, for what else did she have?

_"There is no fixing that one"_ she heard old nursemaids say to one another, long ago, when they thought she could not hear, _"something isn't right in her mind, poor dear". _Eurydice didn't understand what they meant—how can a _head_ be 'right' or 'wrong'? Was there a hole at the top of her skull that she could not see which needed to be patched like one patched a torn blanket? At night she used to search her head in a mirror and ask Melia to stand on their bed and look to see where in the nest of her hair this 'broken' part might be but never did they find such a wound or crack.

Despite it all, Eurydice never felt as though there might have been something 'wrong' with her—and she wondered to herself sometimes why it mattered if there was.

Even still, it gave her Papae such endless grief and though he erupted into a thrashing, violent rage whenever he caught the nursemaids whispering, it was _Eurydice_ whom he treated with the greatest of hostility—shaking her about, telling her to _smile, smile, smile_, grabbing at her hands when she tried to cover her ears, forcing her body straight and still, slapping her when her eyes went up and down and nowhere, _always_ touching her. In his determined way, he was going to fix what he saw as her flaws, her cruel disobedience, for what child would be so hateful as to bring him such shame every day? Truly, her dullness must be rebellion or a quirk to stomp out. "They are wrong," he snarled with his shining teeth exposed, "I will make sure of it". He'd have no more of the jeering by his subjects or royal peers, no more of these rumors of the Prince's ill first born.

Thus, he stole her from her and her sister's cozy chambers and brought her to the single room of the east tower with only the one window and the one locked door, with the lonely bed and the bookcase with the books she had already read, with the chairs that were much too big for her little form and yet she dragged it across the floor every day so she could look out into the world and float off to somewhere that most would tell her did not exist.

This tower was where she would be 'fixed', Papae told her, the place where he would hide his heartless thing. Every day he would come along with his ivory key twirled around his finger and every day he would look upon her with narrowed eyes—and every day she would ask him if he wanted to watch the forest with her.

"No," He'd sneer and would yank her away by the collar of her dress, "Away from there lest someone see you."

Eurydice would get down from her chair and then she would ask, "May I leave soon? I want to leave this room."

And he would say, every time, with a long frown on his face, "When you are no longer a heartless thing, the door will be unlocked and you may go where you please."

How does one stop being 'heartless'? How does one become 'right'? Once she asked these questions to him as well but what came of it was the flashing of his violet eyes and she knew what followed after was always, _always_ a smack across the face and a scream in her ears about how disrespectful she was. Eurydice stopped asking.

Not all his visits were unkind. Sometimes Papae came with her favored treats in a basket and stories to tell her. Sometimes, he would take her by the hand, ignoring the way she flinched and fidgeted away, and tell her how special she was—a child with the golden blood of her great-grandfather King and the pure green blood of her mother, born of a legendary hero whose arrows and lips were kissed by Andruil—that she must live up to her noble lineage, to her position as his eldest child, his inheritor, his destined little High Keeper, his pride and joy. Sometimes he would tell her how Melia wished for her to return or how Nike got into trouble with their nursemaids or how much her newest brothers, Izark and Ion, were learning day by day. Never did he mention Mamae and Eurydice did not ask, for she knew Mamae did not miss her much if she even noticed she was gone at all.

In these moments, he would smile at her and would speak to her in a soft honeyed voice and the little one would be content, for the Papae she loved most—the Papae of her smaller years when there was nothing yet 'broken' about her—would be in the room with her.

But _sometimes_ was not _all_ the time and more often than not, the Papae which visited her tower was the one who seemed to barely be able to stand in the same room as her and who found fault in her voice, her eyes, her body, her very movements, even the way her breath caught in her throat. From across the room, he would berate her for things she could not help doing or did not realize was so offensive; once or twice he would bite out his reprimands and when that did not work, he would screech and curse at her for her willful refusal.

Then, he would seize her and she learned to go limp when he did.

There were times she would do her best to please him and then, more often, there were times when she would just…stop and go someplace quiet, where the ringing wasn't in her ears hurting her, somewhere she was safe even if her physical body wasn't.

Eventually, Papae would take his leave of the tower and Eurydice would wait until below her feet she felt the vibrations of the slamming door before she jumped off her chair. With cautious hands, she would take hold of the fine silver handle and pull the door but it would not ever budge, only whining in protest at her insistence, and so the girl would accept once again that her head was still not 'right' and that her chest was still so very empty.

And there she stayed and there she awoke, alone, from day to day to day…

…to this day, where she sat by her window with her fingers combing through strands of unkempt hair and bounced her little legs over and over—and there, in the belly of her tower, did she hear the large iron door yawning open and two voices bumping over one another in a hush, incoherent tone. Her eyes stopped searching the empty blue of the sky but she did not turn as the familiar jiggling ankle bracelets and the clank of a staff against the staircase filled the hollow keep like a song.

Her hands dropped from her hair and she waited, head buzzing and fingers itching and curling at the hem of her dress. It was one of the _special_ days today. The day when she saw her only other visitor; her _Ghilan_.

The voices came closer, hissing at each other harshly. Slowly, the old clink of the latch lifting came and the door was opened, but only the Lady Deshanna entered. For the first few lessons, Papae slithered in and stood against the wall with his arms crossed, his pointed gaze crawling across the child's skin as if trying to find the shim to peel it off, but the Lady soon commanded that he leave—a Prince he may be, but _she_ was a High Keeper and she would not have him scrutinizing her work, putting her to task just as he put the girl. Papae sneered at her but he obeyed; now he lingered out in the hall, impatiently pacing back and forth as a dog waiting for its game would.

"Aneth ara, da'lan."

The Lady shut the door behind her as she shook her pitched black hair free of her hood and gave her a gentle wave in greeting. Eurydice did not return it. Silently, she jumped down from her chair and grabbed it by two of its legs, heaving it back towards the center of the room where another chair resigned. Leaning her staff against the back of it and shedding her long sapphire cloak, the Lady fell into her seat with a heavy sigh.

"That father of yours; spoiled princeling he is…" She muttered under her breath, her jeweled, golden brown hands pushing her hair out of her face, her expression knotted up as she sent an aggravated look at the doorway. She wasn't speaking to the child so much as _at_ her, as people normally did as if she was a walking journal—existing only to have words put upon but never thinking or holding an opinion on their meanings. The Lady watched as Eurydice climbed onto her chair and settled into it with a fidget, her dull violet eyes set on the embroidered golden rivers that ran down the High Keeper's skirt.

The Lady took her time examining the girl before she spoke in a silvery voice, "You are looking well. Your Father frets about your sickness for nothing once more, I see."

Eurydice did not answer.

"…but never you mind that, da'lan. He is a restless man as he has always been; no changing that. Now, tell me, have you been practicing your magic since our last meeting?"

Eurydice's eyes darted from the threaded yellow river to the window, aching to look out it again. Her hands found their way to the front of her dress and curled them in the fabric. "No." She answered.

The Lady's lips turned into a thin line but whatever harsh scolding she might have stayed in her mouth. It was not the first nor was it expected to be the last time the girl ignored her lessons. _Specifically _ignored them as it was not a lack of talent or knowledge that hindered her from doing so; Eurydice simply didn't want to or, rather, felt no reason to do so.

"…I see…" She finally said after a long pause, "but you remember what I told you?"

This time Eurydice peeked up at her through her eyelashes and she nodded stiffly. "Yes."

"Tell me, then." The Lady Deshanna lifted her hand up between them and let the magic flare up out of her bones and capture her palm in a wisp of crackling cool fire. The gesture stirred the girl; with her lips parted, Eurydice untangled one of her own hands from her dress and held it up next to her Ghilan's. Life against the lifeless. Dark brilliance to white nothing. The fire ghosted over her skin, harmless and soft as a feather.

"…Magic is not a blessing nor a gift. It does not pick from the worthy nor the unworthy, the sinners and the virtuous, noble or mud blooded. It is not the beat of your heart or the breath from your throat. Magic is old, older than the Evanuris, the God of the Gods," in her listless voice the child spoke, her fingers flexing, and then a small spark of blue jolted from her middle finger, "—and it is I, the whole of my soul, the sum of my parts—

Out from the spark came a current that flickered and jolted from finger to finger, wrapping her tips in bolts of intense white. The magic keened, popping in its indirection, blinded by her growing confusion at the wild nature that she had captured her hand.

The Lady was smiling, "Yes…that is it. You have it…" Her hands reached from Eurydice's, her intention to guide the magic into a more stable form, but as her fingers brushed the child's skin, the currents died and the child was shrinking back in her chair.

"No." Eurydice said as she cradled her hand against her chest, "I do not like it."

The Lady slid her hands away quickly and put them up for the girl to see. "I know…I know…" She sighed. Last visit they had gotten farther with the girl's lessons; it had taken all of an hour but she managed to coax her into performing a small display of lightning that had struck the ceiling and painted the room in a hue of vibrate colors. Eurydice, who approached magic with stubborn and strange resistance despite her talent for it, had even asked to perform it once more but as she was small and so very inept, Deshanna had advised against it. It had been her hope, however slim, that her return would prompt the girl into wishing to learn a little more but as she looked at her now, Eurydice's knees drawn up on the chair and her head bowed, she knew something had been undone.

There was creak calling from the doorway—a step being taken at the threshold. The Lady noticed how Eurydice's eyes flickered at it and her small body seemed to harden into a protective shell.

A bitter, nasty taste welled up and washed over her tongue and the Lady scowled, but whatever curses she may have wanted to shout at the door were quilled. It…was not her place to speak here, not in a prince's home or of a prince's child, even if that child was her chosen First.

"It…" She swallowed and then spoke, "It was a commendable first attempt. It would have been wiser to leave you be, I see now. Later, if you are willing, we can try again." A hand raised to touch the top of the child's head but the Lady stilled it, thinking better of it. Instead, she let it drop to her lap and bent her head as to maybe catch Eurydice's eye or, at the least, let her see there was no anger on her face. "Perhaps we will do something you favor. Tell me, da'lan, what do you want?"

There was a sliver of uneasy movement before Eurydice lifted her head up and regarded her with some interest. Soundlessly she slipped off the chair as if she were water from a spilling cup and walked round to the other side of the Lady where her staff rested. Gingerly she took it into her hand and felt the hum of her Ghilan's magic against her fingers from within the dahl'amythal wood. It smelled pretty, like ashes, smoke, like Prophet's Laurel burning at the hearth of Mythal. At its top sat the channeling stone, a powerful malachite cut into a rigid beacon, the black of it waving about as if it was a crystal ball filled with murky water, which made the whole thing a struggle for her to pick up and hold upright, her feet stumbling as she turned it horizontal in her hands.

She walked in front of the Lady and held the staff out to her, "I want you to tell me of Ghilan'nain again. Ghilan'nain and her halla." It almost sounded like a plea coming out of her. Of all the lessons, all the histories, the origins, the spells, the myths, it was only ever the stories of hallas and harts, of Ghilan'nain in her splendid form gallivanting through the forest, marking the way with her hoof prints and her call for weary travelers, that Eurydice asked for. It was her favorite, the only thing that set her dim violet eyes alight and the Lady Deshanna had no reason to deny her, for the rare smile she received was a precious secret indeed.

"As you wish," said the Lady, beaming from ear to ear as she took her staff and banged it twice against the floor. From the bottom emerged a swarm of wisping green air which tangled and twirled and morphed into shapes of halla, some hulking, some babes at the mother's side, some with horns adorned with leaves, others with shattered horns, always proud as they strode through the small circular room, hopping about across the child's wild eyes.

Ghilan'nain came together in a cloud of streaming sunlight as if she had poured down from the sky itself, her eyes a green that could never be imagined nor described, her horns and fur woven with flowers and fruits, and she was the largest of them all, majestic in her endlessness. Though this ghost of a God could never compare to that of the real thing, the two elves nevertheless bowed their heads in worship—and the image bowed hers when Eurydice came near on the tips of her toes, reaching for the head that wasn't there, burying fingers in the short strands she couldn't feel, making a pleased noise when Ghilan'nain nuzzled her transparent nose into her face.

While Eurydice put her hands on these illusions and ran along with the young ones as if they were in a wide-open field covered in wheat and long grass, the Lady Deshanna was content to recline back and weave for her amusement and education tales of the wondrous Evanuris who had been like them once upon a time: mortal, young, rotting away in the shell that was her short-lived body. In these small pockets of time, Eurydice was her happiest. In the Lady's tales, there were no towers to confide her, no 'right' or 'wrong' to be, no heartless girls, or prying eyes of courtiers who laughed behind their hands. There was no creaking behind the door or a lock to be turned. It was only the forest and the halla and a goddess and her. Happy, free, and awed enough to sometimes go to her Ghilan's side and ask her if she may rest her head on her lap as she told her things and because her Ghilan was kind, she would let her do so, and Eurydice could ramble on about what she knew and regurgitate her own stories with its own twists.

And the world, as tiny as it could be, was right for once.

Then Papae opened the door.

The magic spun to smoke and evaporated as he marched in with lips in a tight line as if the very air in the room put a sour taste in his mouth. He ignored the Lady regarding him with a critical eye as he sought out his child. He found her, much to his displeasure, at the foot of her bed on her knees with the blanket over her head as she groped around underneath it.

"Eurydice!" He barked and she stiffened instantly, "What are you doing under there?"

The child shifted and cupped one of her ears as she pulled the blanket from her head. "Halla…I am looking for the halla."

Papae scoffed at her explanation but as he opened his mouth, the Lady Deshanna stood from her chair as she put her cloak over her shoulders and spoke, "That was my doing, my Prince. My story got out of hand and the da'lan was simply calling my puppets from their hiding place."

"She had you straying from her lessons again, is what you mean to say. You were to teach her control, High Keeper, not give in to her whims." He retorted, then turned his attention back to Eurydice, "Insolent thing, I told you to heed the Lady, did I not? You distracted her again and wasted her time with your nonsense."

Eurydice stood up and fisted a handful of hair, pulling at it over and over. Her eyes looked off to the window.

There was the gruff sound, a growl at the back of his throat, as he shouted, "Eurydice! Look at me when I speak to you!"

The child did so only for a second and only because he had startled her so—but in the next she was flinching away and grabbing at her poor ears, her eyes shutting tight. _'No more yelling'_, she wanted to say but her mouth would not move, _'it hurts when you yell'_.

There was the hush of fabric as the Lady Deshanna stepped between the two; her staff a protective wall she placed in front of the girl. "Hold your tongue, my Prince. The stories I tell of Ghilan'nain and the Halla are no such nonsense. They are our history and if da'lan wishes to hear of it before her other histories, why should I not teach it? You well know this, having been taught the same lessons—"

Papae sniffed indignantly.

"—_and _learned how important these stories can be. Eurydice…" The Lady's voice lost its edge as she said the girl's name and it wavered, "…may have not performed a complete spell, but her magic is strong and she is a clever one. In fact, this room…" she gestured around them, "it might hinder her power. It would be best to allow me to take her outside, perhaps to the river valley, where she can extend her reach with less trouble and see the places I speak of in her—"

"No," came Papae's answer, "Eurydice is still very ill, High Keeper. The risk to her health and constitution is too high should she wander out there. She stays where she is safest."

"Prince Lycus, _please_, I implore you to think—"

"I said _no_. My answer will not change." He bit out, his eyes flashing at the Lady threateningly, "You speak out of turn in my house; _all_ I ever think about is my child".

If there had been a speck of hope in the child that he would listen to the Keeper, it certainly fell dead right there at her feet. The Lady's fists clenched around her staff, her knuckles straining white, but if she meant to attack with words or a spell, it never came. Her shoulders gave way underneath her dense cloak and she spared maybe a fleeting look at the girl, though Eurydice would have never understood it as pity.

"…as you say, my Prince. Forgive my impudence. It was from a good place." She exhaled, "I shall take my leave."

Papae nodded and moved aside to let the Lady pass but as she began to pick up the folds of her skirt and walk, she paused and patted her sides. "Oh, wait. Where is my mind at this day?" She said as she turned to Eurydice and bent to her height, "I had meant to give you something, da'lan. What a forgetful old creature your Ghilan is becoming."

Eurydice gave her no response but her ears fluttered up curiously as the Lady reached into her cloak and fished around in the pouch at her side. From it, she presented a white wooded halla which was no bigger than her hand and whose glittering eyes were cut from a veil quartz. A little startled sound came out of the girl, her eyes wide and though she did not smile, she flapped her hands and twisted them about, looking between the toy and the Lady for permission to touch it.

The Lady Deshanna beamed from ear to ear at her, "Is it not lovely? I thought it best for you to have one to play with—at least until you can make your own herd to gallivant around your room…unless, of course, your father believes this, too, is a risk to your health." She added with a side glance at Papae, daring him to deny her.

But save for a low grunt, he said nothing. Eurydice marveled at the toy with bated breath but she hesitated in taking it. "Can I hold it?" She asked, shifting on her feet from right to left.

"Of course, da'lan."

Delicately Eurydice took it with both her hands in the same manner someone took hold of a holy artifact and held up to her face. It was beautiful. Though there was no life in it, she held it as if there was warmth underneath the fur and looked at it as if it could breathe, and she fancied that if she let it go, it might jump right out of her hands and to the window. And she would chase after it if it did, right down to the forest, and if her father came running after her, she wouldn't turn back.

Ah, no; but that was a bad thought, yes? Very bad.

As if he could read her thoughts, Papae spoke up "Do not be an ungrateful thing, Eurydice. Give proper thanks to the Lady."

She blinked at the Lady's smiling mouth and said, "Ma serannas."

The tender smile stretched farther, "My time is well-spent" and her hand moved toward the top of Eurydice's head but she hesitated again and then withdrew it back into her cloak. Pleased with herself, she pulled herself up with staff and gave a nod to Papae. He returned it, if only because she was due it, and then motioned for her to go through the door. If there was anything said of a goodbye, Eurydice did not hear it.

As the door shut behind the two, the girl was already turning on her heel and pushing her chair with the one hand back to her beloved window, the other tenderly cradling the halla to her chest as if it were her babe. Underneath her feet came the vibrations of the two voices warring, echoing through the stone and hollowed tree walls as they clattered down to the outside world; whatever was said was lost on her ears, though. Eurydice mounted her chair and placed the halla on the window pane, positioned ever so slightly so its head could see out over her forest.

"Hello." She greeted it, her fingers excitedly combing and knotting through her hair as she sat on her heels and leaned out over the pane. "It is nice to meet you. Do you want to see my forest?" Whether it answered her or not, it did not matter—she spoke to it anyway. About the trees, the larks that sang on her roof, about the clouds that visited, the spirits that danced on the forest floor when the stars were high, about the sound of the river and where the halla would find the best of the shade. She asked it where it would go on its travels and if it would take her there. And she was happy, in her own way, because in this place of only her, she finally had something that wanted to be by her side.

This was the reason she did not check the door as she usually did. Not until the sky was smearing from blue to purple and the moons were taking their high thrones in the sky, full and bright. She was resting her head on the window's frame, skimming the halla's engraved features with her nail when the orbs hanging from her ceiling began to light and a whiff of roasted ram filled the room. Every morning, every mid-day, and every evening a full meal would appear on her table by way of a spell and an hour later the same spell would come along and steal away her scraps. She didn't know who or what made them but just as everything else it was expected that Papae had a hand in it, having occasionally returned abruptly to scold her for not eating enough or even at all. Whoever cooked the meals, in her opinion, had a lack of taste—she'd much rather a plate of peaches and berries than the over spiced and overdone meats she was required to eat.

Eurydice wrinkled her nose as she languidly lifted her head and slid down her chair with her toy in hand. As she approached the meal, that is when she saw it. A sliver of light across the floor from the crack in the door.

The crack—because the door was _open_.

She stopped breathing. She didn't believe it was real at first. A trick from her head, maybe. She crouched next to it and stared at it, then smacked the ground where it fell to see if it would disappear. It stayed, casting across her hand when she raised it up and turned it around.

It was _real_.

And the door. It was still _open_.

Scrambling to her feet, the girl ran to the door and gripped the handle with both hands. Taking a few deep breaths, she pulled and prepared herself for the door's resistance, the cry of the lock protesting, and the knowledge that she was wrong once again and still very _'wrong'_ in the head.

Instead, the door came forward with a heavy groan and the light from the hallways orbs flooded in, bathing her in white—bathing her in _freedom_.

Eurydice wavered with her hand on the doorway, the halla falling deafly from her grasp, and with uncertain wide eyes she stared down the lit corridor and the stairs she hadn't walked down in over six passing seasons. It was daunting to make heads or tails of it, that the door was unlocked and she was free to go. That Papae, for whatever reason, had decided this day she had succeeded in her task to 'fix' herself.

No longer was she a 'heartless thing'.

Carefully, she put her hand over her chest and—when she felt the beat of her heart against her palm, sure that it was there and she was 'right'—she took a wary step over the threshold. The second step followed after, gentle on the floor as if it was delicate glass ready to crack. The third step came and confidently she was sure she wouldn't be dragged back into the room. The fourth was her victory and she celebrated by fleeing down the staircase without a single thought in her head and flinging the heavy iron door of the tower open, releasing her into the world as it was shaded over by night's touch.

The forest air hailed her in a crisp embrace which breezed through her hair and her dress, raising goose bumps across her skin. The child opened her mouth and inhaled a mouthful, and though it made her shiver down to her bare toes, it had been the most refreshing thing she had ever imagined—for all she had for so long was the stale, warm tower air with its dust and its stony taste. The mud and grass, too, felt so good under her feet. It tickled and then itched as she dug her toes in and felt the cool, soft earth between them. The feeling of it so wondrous to her that she bent down and pushed her hands in as well and ripped out two ample handfuls of soil and plant which escaped through her fingers.

She hummed, squeezing it until it all fell through unto her dress and back to the ground, and if she had thought of it, she might have stopped herself from dirtying herself as she did. Papae would not be pleased if he saw her caked in earth but she didn't care, for it just felt so nice to be something other than clean, something other than still, something other than cut off from the place she had yearned for so long to be part of.

Rubbing her filthy hands together, Eurydice walked to the line where the forest began and with more ease than when she left her room, crossed it and walked further into it with only the white of the glowing full moons to guide her. As she listened to the whispers of the spirits and birds around her, she looked up over her head and saw something red gleaming at her. Apples; fresh and perfectly round. Though not her favorite of fruits, it had been a long time since she had had one picked new from a tree and suddenly she craved the taste more than she craved the wonder around her.

She remembered her manners first, of course. Putting her hands on her knees, Eurydice bowed her head and her body in respect of the tree, just as the Lady Deshanna had taught her, and she did not dare to lift her eyes until she heard the wood groaning. There—as all trees of their land did because they were older still and held their own magic—it was returning her bow with its own, the elegant branches gilded in bright green leaves hanging low to offer her one of its fruits. Eurydice stood on the tips of her toes and took it, amazed at just how vividly red it was, and then bowed her head again in thanks. The old creature rattled its full head at her as it straightened itself once more and then it quieted, falling to earthly slumber once more.

Eurydice licked her lips as she rubbed the apple on her skirt and opened her mouth to take a bite, but as she did, she saw something rustling in the brush some feet away from her.

_Big_. That's what she first thought when the wolf emerged. Big and that it was dying.

Or, perhaps, dying wasn't quite the right word; it was an ancient, mangy creature, its once shining proud black pelt now matted, grayed, patchy from the battles it must have seen. It stood not with the fluid stride of its kind but with a limp, its weight too much for its old legs, and with its half sliced tail dragging behind it as a burden would. It was shabby, broken, half-starved, better off dead and skinned by someone's standards.

But Eurydice found no quims with it and maybe because, in its injured way, it reminded her of herself. _'Don't worry'_, she wanted to say, _'no one quite likes me either'. _It huffed and shook itself, and from its fur came a dozen or so startled flies.

It peered at her with eyes of a storm—gray and destructive—and she did the same, knowing it must be taking her meager appearance apart as well. It licked its lips when it saw her apple, so Eurydice brought the fruit to her mouth and took a giant chump out of it but did not chew it. Rather, she dropped the bitten piece into her hand and showed it to the wolf, then she tossed it to its feet. The creature didn't move at first, regarding her with those intense but wounded eyes, but then it bent low and ate the piece up ravenously.

Eurydice waited, then she took another bite and threw that piece to the wolf too.

And she did it again.

And again.

And again.

Until her jaw hurt from how hard she would rip at the apple and she decided better of it. The wolf lapped at the sweetness across its yellow teeth, its back less tense and its tail even slightly wagging like a domestic pup. Eurydice took that to mean it had given her a little of its trust so gingerly she took a few steps toward it and when it did not growl nor run off, she took a few more. She offered the rest of the apple to the poor creature, dropping it at its feet, and watched with interest as it tore at the thing and snapped the core in half.

It made what she assumed was a happy sound and tapped her heel into the dirt, twirling her fingers in her hair. "Can I touch you?" She asked and if someone had been with her, they might have told her she was silly, that this pathetic creature could not comprehend her words.

But it raised its glaze with the sort of grace she had once seen her great-grandfather, the only time she had been in his presence, as he stood at his throne and had allowed a lowly subject to speak. Then, as she reached out, he sniffed and touched his nose to her palm and waited patiently for her stroke his fur.

For the one second she did, she mused at how soft it was.

"**_Eurydice!_**"

The wolf was gone, out of her reach and into the woods, and behind her, Papae was screaming—and she didn't understand _why_. She saw him tearing through the trees and brush frantically, his hair usually so neatly done in a single long plait wild around his head, his face twisted up and his eyes wide. It would have been a braver child, or one who understood the madness in his voice, who would have hidden when she saw him but Eurydice was only a bewildered child and so she let him see her.

She shouldn't have, she realized too late, because for an instant she saw his eyes and all that was in them was a black, dripping hatred.

"You—you wretched stupid—**_thing_**!" He howled as he stalked closer to her; a shadow looming over hers, threatening to devour her whole. "Why are you out here?!"

It hurt. It hurt so much. Eurydice's ears rang from the wrath in his voice. "I-I, the wolf—" She tried to explain in her small, fragile voice but it could not withstand that of Papae's as he bellowed at her, "Shut up! _Fenedhis_; if someone had seen you! Do you not listen?! Are you deaf as well as brainless?!"

Desperately she wanted to clap her hands over her ears and shut him out but Papae had grabbed her wrist and was painfully yanking her to him, his voice throbbing through her head. He was saying how much of a shame she was, that she was disobeying him again, he was going to lock her up tighter this time. No more with the Lady Deshanna, she was making her rebellious—back, _heartless thing_, back where no one will see you, back in the tower where you belong—

"NO!"

The scream that erupted out of her didn't sound like her voice; stronger, better, more powerful than the little tweet she would make. Perhaps it wasn't her at all but the magic within her that had ignited the walls of its prison alight and was filling her veins with flames and with fury, promising that if she held onto it any more, if she gulped it down and let it lay in the pit of her stomach, it would explode and tear them all asunder. And so she screamed and from the blood pumping under her skin came the rupture of electricity that keened at the heavens and whipped Papae away.

One could not imagine the power in her hand at that moment—that for once in her life, it was _she_ who held a dangerous hand, glowing with untamed currents of blue and white, and _he_ was the one stumbling back and holding himself.

She, the one in control, and he, the one in pain.

Then, she couldn't hold onto it and she yielded. The magic fizzled out and she was left as she was; weak and vulnerable. Despite herself, she risked a look into her Papae's eyes and all that was there was the monster that had always been inside him, waiting for the day it would break out and end her.

For the first time in her life, Eurydice turned on her heel and ran from her father.

Deeper and darker the forest became around her and she tried to keep up with it, but as she fled him she would trip over roots in the ground and smack into trees. The moons, as kind as they was, could not reach her as the trees became denser and deeper; and maybe if the spirits had a true taste for mortal children, they might have opened a tree and hid her in its belly, sending her father on a misbegotten path where he would get lost and never find her but unluckily they only watched, apart from it all as they always were.

Voiceless and pleading, Eurydice reached out into the darkness and she prayed: _Ghilan'nain guide me somewhere safe!_

If the Goddess heard her tiny cry in the midst of all the world's demands, it mattered not.

Papae snatched her by the hair and yanked her back across the forest floor, kicking and flailing. He twisted her around and then he took that beautiful sword he always kept at his side and he plunged it into her chest. He withdrew it and shoved her to the ground, and then he kept stabbing her, over and over, and every single one was another 'yes' to the question she had never thought to ask but always wondered in the back of her mind:

_Do you hate me, Papae?_

**_Yes_ **_._

Her tiny hands tried to fight him, if one were to give her some last shred of dignity in this world. Slippery with her blood, she clawed at his hand in an attempt to get him away or stop or at least slow the pain down. But Papae was a skilled hunter, the valiant Prince and Pride of the King's Game, and he was stronger than her in every way. So what could she do? Only the smallest of sounds came from her gurgled throat as the child stared up beyond her Papae, at the moons through the branches, and her hands lost their strength and soon there was no pain, no warmth, no fear, no weight over her body, smashing her deeper into the ground.

Only a cool numbness worming its way through her. That and a growl that made her feel one last shard of comfort.

Vaguely, she felt Papae's body lift off of hers and knew he was leaving, that the sword coated with her blood was going with him, that it was over and he was gone. Something came overhead and pressed against her face. Wet. A tongue. It was soft. Fur.

It whimpered and it whined and she saw beautiful gray eyes.

The wolf.

"…a..h…ha…" What was she trying to say? Neither her mind nor her mouth could form words, only the most pitiful of shattered sounds. Still, she made them as the wolf lowered its head and brushed its face against hers. So soft. She wished she had more time to feel it. It would have been nice. She moved her head into the wolf's warmth with last of her life.

She stopped breathing.

The wolf nudged the lifeless body with its nose and licked her face rapidly in its attempt to rouse her, but nothing came of it. It peered at her with the most sorrowful of eyes and to the sky it sent the most mournful of howls, so loud and so anguished that even the spirits hushed and the wind came to a halt. No sounds existed within this darken realm, save for one; the crunch of twigs breaking under hooves and with it came a soft, dreamy bright light that broke past the tangled trees and vines. The wolf acknowledged it with a flicker of its ear before it dashed off the tiny corpse and scampered into the shadows, watching with a glowing glare as out from the woods came two halla. One was a small, ordinary halla with the glimmer white horns while the other was hulking and burst with a yellow light from within its chest as if its very heart was the sun itself and it had seen fit that this place would be the best place for a walk. Its horns were not graced with flowers or leaves, no gold or silver was painted on its flank, and its eyes were not the green hue of legend but white and sightless and across them was a long rigid scar that the halla displayed as proudly as any crown on a queen's head.

It took a step and from its hooves sprouted flowers. It took another and there instead came a foot with rich, dark skin. The fur, the horns, they melted away to reveal a gorgeous woman wrapped in a simple linen dress and with hair the feathered gold of halla's horns. Still across her unseeing eyes was that pink scar and still from her heart there was the glow of the sun. The lady's companion strode in front of her and kneeled next to the little girl's corpse, its head pressing against her slowly growing colder cheek. Scratching the halla's ears, the woman joined her on the ground and gently brushed a sticky strand of hair from her face.

"Poor thing…" She cooed and her voice rang like temple chimes. "What a fate…what a fate, to be treated such as this. You should have called me sooner, little princess. Hush now," She said as if the corpse could protest, "I shall make it right."

With great care the woman cradled the girl's head in her hands and opened her slightly agape mouth wider—she opened her own and breathed into the girl's lungs a green mist. For a moment, nothing happened.

Then the child's chest rose and then it fell, and the blood from her body started to fade, and the wounds across her poor abused body began to seal themselves. Dipping her finger in the vanishing blood, the woman drew on the child's face a patterned of slender and ornate lines; curved pink horns of a halla wrapped in leaves.

But not all the wounds disappeared. In her chest, over her heart, was a gaping hole that once gushed with hot blood but was now drying and in its place the skin cracked as if it were all made of clay that has been bashed in. Into that hole the smiling woman put her hand and took from it a dead, crumbling mound of hardened flesh—the child's heart, no longer thumping with life and split down the middle by her Papae's sword.

"Ah, what damage he has done to you, little princess. I cannot fix this." She said mournfully and tsked.

There was slight movement as the halla rested its head on the girl's arm; her eyelids fluttered open slowly and under her white lashes were her violet eyes surrounded by black rather than white. The child looked around her, her limbs feeling as though if she tried to move even one, they would snap off her body like that of a doll's. Still, when she saw her heart in the woman's hand, she managed to extend her arm and try to touch the useless thing.

"…give…gi…ve it to me…" She croaked, "I…have to show it to Papae…I have to show him…"

She touched it and the weight of that was simply too much for the fragile mound to take. Her heart collapsed into a pile of red dust in the woman's hand and with it so did all of Eurydice's memories, her past, her future, her soul, until there was nothing left inside her save for her name echoing in her ear—and even that she did not truly understand at first.

"That was bound to happen, I suppose…better you than he or I." The woman sighed as she reached into her dress' pocket and took out a small pouch. Opening it she slipped the heart's remains inside, allowing not one fragment to escape.

From the darkness, the quiet voice of a man spoke, "What are you doing, Ghilan'nain?"

The woman inclined her head toward the sound and said, "Answering the call of my name and saving Falon'Din a depressing trip to the Beyond. You understand; he does not enjoy the task of guiding young ones. Too many questions, no right answers to give."

"…and what do you plan to do with her? Make her your child?"

"Perhaps. I have always desired one. What would _you_ have me do? Leave her to fester and decay on these roots? No, I think not. I am not as cruel as you." She tied a string around the pouch tightly and began to rose, her halla following after her. Eurydice stayed and stared at the red dust on her fingers.

There was a tense silence and then the voice asked, "…why didn't you save her?"

"Why didn't _you_?"

Again there was silence.

"In the end, the life that mortal ended would have never lasted long. I give her new life now; I want to see what she does with it." The woman told the darkness and then to the girl, "Up on your feet now, da'lan. I have turned the wheel of fate anew and I will not have it wasted. Up, I say."

Eurydice regarded her with her listless eyes and stiffly did as she was told. She stood with no torment, no limp in her step, though from the shattered hole of her chest fell a piece of hardened skin, sharp on the forest floor like a crystal shard. She did not notice it nor did she notice that the eyes of the wolf in the darkness had shifted and now they were held by the shadow of a man, tall and slender, who watched the woman with an old, knowing wariness.

"Here. It is yours to do with as you please." The woman handed the pouch to the girl and though it was ruined, Eurydice could feel the flutter of something within.

"Come now," Ghilan'nain said as she placed her hand on her halla and created a path of light through the woods, though she needed it not. She walked on towards it and Eurydice followed, asking her "Can I touch the halla?"

"Of course."

So she did and when she looked behind her, the shadow, the wolf, the man was gone—and soon, so was she.

* * *

**Elven phrases and words (credit to Katie's Best-Guess-At-Elvhen-Dictionary and the DA Wiki)**

**Aneth ara:** A sociable or friendly greeting, more commonly used among the Dalish themselves rather than with outsiders.  
**Dahl'amythal:** Tree of Mythal from which Dalish Keepers' staves are cut.  
**Da'lan: **Little child; little one.  
**Fenedhis: **Meaning officially undefined as of yet; a common curse.  
**Ghilan:** guide/teacher (derived from 'Ghilana')  
**Mamae:** Mother (Mama).  
**Papae:** Father (Papa).


	3. The Hunt

**Part III: The Hunt**

"Look ahead, Jim. You could walk straight into a beast's maw and never know it with your eyes everywhere else."

The colliding of his shoulder against an unsuspecting tree is what startled the boy into snapping his eyes forward. His fellow companions were marching ahead of him and though Rylen had been kind enough to slow his pace, the other two knights and the mabari cared little to do so. Shifting the weight of the supply pack on his back, the squire shot one last cagey glance over his shoulder and sprinted to meet with the rest.

"Sorry, Ser. It's, uh, I mislike the looks of these woods. Maryden—damn that woman—s-she spoke of a story last night of a w…_witch_ who dwells in this forest."

Rylen fixed him with an amused look as they walked on, "Aye, that right? Which witch is that, pray tell? The one who wears the skins of men she's seduced around her like a winter cloak or the one raised feral as a wolf with poison on her teeth and who steals young girls for her bloody bathes?" He smiled, meaning no ill will by it.

Of course, Rylen had heard each of the bard's tales and more. They _all_ had. She did a splendid job of scaring the breeches off new recruits every night, weeding the overzealous thrill seekers from the right sort who stuck 'round despite pissing themselves. The boy here, quivering at his knees and pale in the face, seemed to be the latter, which Rylen thought was a fine thing to be—better that than the inane fool who'd get them all killed for one fleeting moment of glory.

Jim, though, took no comfort in the Knight's teasing. He swallowed thickly before stuttering, "She…she said the witch shapes herself into black trees and uses sharp branches to gouge out the eyes of those who dawdle too close to her…t-then she eats them like grapes." He jerked away from one such tree, swearing upon Andraste's holy ass that it jutted a branch in his direction.

"I'll admit; I haven't heard that one before—or maybe I have but it was a bush the witch turned into or a rabbit that ate travelers' toes. She recites too many to keep count of and too late into a night to properly recall." He spoke lightly but Jim's face became no less pale nor did his eyes stop scattering about frightfully.

With a heavy hand, the Knight clapped the boy on the shoulder, "Worry not, lad. Rarely do witches or their like go after groups. It draws too much attention to them—most are solitary creatures who live only in the lost, dark parts of the woods. Wander not and keep your head in check, yeah? We'll be back at the tavern with the loveliest lads and lasses, no doubt. I'll even introduce you to my favorites. How's _that_ for you?" He grinned and smacked Jim across the back, spurring from him a cough and then an awkward laugh, a feeble smile playing across his lips.

It was ahead of them that they heard a familiar disgusted grunt, their fellow Knight turning her sharp glare unto them, a silent scolding that had Jim rattling in his boots, and then she rolled her eyes.

Letting go of the squire, Rylen pointed his thumb toward the woman, "Pay Cassandra no mind. She has little taste in a bard's tales lest they be sweeping romantic epics or from a cheap novel."

There came the click of her tongue, "My_ tastes_ have no relevance here. This prattle is distracting both of you from the matter at hand" she said sourly, turning her sight back on the path ahead and squarely ignoring the playful expression on Rylen's face.

"'Prattle', is it? Why, we were only speaking of the omens of the wood. We'd be halfwits not to—isn't that right, Jim?" The Knight nudged the edgy squire with his elbow, coaxing him to nod and muster the courage to speak.

"T-that's r-right, S-ser. It—the tales, they're warnings, I w-was only—"

"You were speaking to fill the silence. It is a mark of your foolishness." Cassandra remarked so cuttingly that Jim lurched backward as if her statement was a blade that had just slit his throat. He deflated then, his expression turning to one of embarrassment. She spied it out of the corner of her eye and there came a change to her face, her narrowed gaze softening a small degree as she remembered that she was not dealing with a seasoned warrior but a recruit barely into his manhood, the shine in his eyes proof of the innocence he had yet to lose.

She sighed and, catching a pointed look from Rylen, halted her stride, "They are _not_ warnings. Bards' tales make rumors into fantastic intrigues. It's dangerous to believe them." She informed him sternly, "Many of the tales are fabricated; those that aren't do not speak of the truth of the woods. Am I understood?"

Flushing a dark shameful red, Jim struggled under the heavy weight of Cassandra's stare. His eyes moved about them, looking for proof of his dread between the trees and strips of light—the forest's insidious nature playing out in the form of a bloodied, beckoning hand or the flash of a thousand teeth in a human mouth, but nothing announced itself. The shadows and the brush which surrounded the group were peaceful and unassuming—and that petrified him far more than the stories.

Cassandra asked again: "Am I?"

Timidly, Jim brought his eyes back to her and, with his mouth tasting of dry sand, nodded, "Y-yes, Ser…I'll…I'll keep that in m-mind…" The last of his words died down and faded into barely a whimper.

The two Knights stared at the boy with almost pitying eyes. They chanced a glance at each other and they wondered, not for the first nor last time, if it had been wise to bring this eager young lad to hunt for something as venomous as a lindworm.

Ryeln, perhaps, would have said to stop there—send Jim home while they had a chance—but before he could, Cassandra had turned away from him. This squire was not a child to be coddled, even if Rylen had a habit of doing just that with newer recruits. It had been _Jim's_ choice to enter into the service of the Inquisition; he had formally requested to join them knowing where they were going and what they were hunting.

Where that choice led him, to victory or peace by the Maker's side, that was up to him.

Further down the path they had carved with knives and hefty boots, a dog's muffled bark called for their attention. In the wood's flourish, their last companion rested on his knee with his back hunched and one hand fisting a strip of silvery skin, sliced away from the belly of the lindworm. It reeked of rot in spite of how splendid it shone, as if it were a handkerchief kissed and given away by a noble lady. He was careful when he held it up to the mabari's muzzle, his other hand hooked in the leather collar to keep him at bay.

As she came near, Cassandra heard her companion murmuring to the creature and watched with interest as the dog, Dane, settled his fidgeting hind legs and peered into the man's eyes. What he was whispering to him she did catch but she knew it mattered not; the conversation was only for a dog lord and his bonded hound, an understanding she would never grasp lest she had a mabari of her own. The dog's ears fluttered obediently and he bent his head to the lindworm's flesh as his master released his neck. He huffed, its putrid scent in his nose and though he bucked at it, it took the dog no time to press his face to the dirt and take off in one fluid, powerful leap, chasing after a trail only he could comprehend.

"Reconnaissance surveyed the area to the west. They found nothing." Cassandra disclosed as the dog vanished between the wall of intimidating foliage.

The Knight did not get to his feet, instead grunting as he pocketed the skin and pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose. "They reported that once they lost the trail, they could go no deeper. Had they had the foresight to take a mabari, they might have found something." He said with a hoarse voice that seemed to strain with every word, as if the very act of speech was an exhausting chore.

Cassandra eyed the back of his head briefly and frowned. "The lindworm's scent is a strong one. It should not have required a mabari to locate it."

"It must have used something to cover its smell. Mud or moss, possibly…Or if it went by a river, water."

"Do you truly believe it to be that smart?" She inquired, but reply he did not. She waited for him to rise to debate—to claim as he usually did that beasts such as this weren't smart, they were _'devious'_—but there came nothing of the sort. Only a stifled groan.

"Cullen?"

A shaking hiss was his next answer.

It occurred to her then why he had not stood up; rather he had his head on his hands and was holding as if it was about to split in two right down the middle. It took her little time to recognize the signs. Cassandra reached for him and took hold of one of his arms. The Knight stiffened at her touch, a protesting snarl sounding from behind his gritted teeth, but it was evident he had little energy to wrench himself from her as she heaved him to his feet and held him close to her side by his forearm.

"Are you well?" She asked in a hush, cautious as not to alert the other two.

He twisted his arm from her grip as he bit out "I am _fine_. Release me." each of his words teetered on the edge of hostility. As he trodden back on unsure feet, he rolled his shoulders and set them firmly, defiantly trying to appear stable as he muttered, "It is only a headache, nothing more."

A lie; a terrible lie he couldn't even bolster by looking her in the eye when he said it and if Cassandra didn't know Cullen, hadn't been on the receiving end of his threateningly idiotic stubbornness before, she might've been insulted. As it was, it mattered not if he had been truthful with her. Anyone could take one look at him and tell that he was not a well man.

No, not in the slightest.

Next to the peerless woman before him—a solid force of nature, her beautifully scarred olive skin and shining black rustled hair undeterred by the day long hunt—he was a shadow of what he once had been. Where she appeared born of strength, constructed by blood tarnished steel and black iron, he could feel his own strength pouring out of him, the bulk of his armor crushing him down to the brittle soul. He was gaunt, face a whiter shade than even Jim's, littered with graying purple and red from all the hours spent never sleeping, always staring out into nothing, forcing himself into the daylight for another day. Dirty, sweaty, his hair combed back smoothly if only out of habit, but the rest of him unkempt as the growing shaggy beard he had once again forgotten to save.

Cassandra looked at him and felt a sympathy like no other, a prayer to the Maker that her friend would see past his own jackassery.

Cullen looked upon her and felt mocked by her health, and by her reliance on her own being, while he struggled to grasp at even the smallest strings of resolve and even then, that resolve could only sometimes be found in the vibrant blue drop of lyrium in his veins.

And that, he knew, was the crux of it all—he was coming far too fast to the last of his lyrium supply.

Even now he could feel the burden of the small vial through his clothes and armor, his fingers itching to reach into his pack and fish it out, to take his kit, to find a dark corner, to shoot it all into his blood and feel the hum of the song throb a razor-sharp path to his core. This morning's vial hadn't been enough for him. Knowing the dwarves would take another week to arrive with a new shipment, he had attempted to conserve what little he had left but he saw now how stupid that was. The lyrium he received was far less potent than it should've been, nearly as watered down as the flasks the more magical inclined were given.

Taking so little of such cheap product gave him no relief. He might as well have taken nothing as far as his body was concerned—it called out for the sweet embrace of the song and when it only received a dying whispered, it lashed down out against him with fire and ice alike.

But, Maker, he would not let it take this hunt away from him. Kill him if it must but do it while he had a blade in his hand and a wound over his heart.

Cullen resisted the urge to flinch as he felt a particularly agonizing surge, the tremor of Cassandra's voice an arrow right between the eyes. "_'Nothing'_ is what brought you to your knees?" Cassandra sneered as she crossed her arms. Her voice was still low, careful as she was to not draw the alarm of their companions—though little did it matter, as Rylen was as aware of Cullen's 'nothings' as she was. "You told me you were 'well'. If I had known you were this burdened, I would have…" She stopped herself, the end of her sentence petering out as she searched her mind for something better, something less brash and less cruel than what she wanted to say.

He scowled at her, his eyes flashing when he countered, "What? Left me behind? This is our mission, not _yours_. I was ordered to do this and I will have it done."

"You expect me to let you risk your life...for this?" She asked incredulously.

"If need be, yes. I trust you know there is no other option other than that." At that, he looked away from her, because she was too bright and too strong, and he would not let her steal what was left of him—what little was still _good_ in him—away with her expression. Even still, he felt her eyes relentlessly tear into him and he could do nothing but willfully hold his ground as if he were a child refusing to go to his room.

"Oh, there are plenty but you're a daft ass, mate."

Rylen frowned at the back of his friend's head as he and Jim approached them, having caught the tail end of the otherwise unsubtle conversation. He rounded about Cullen, trying to catch a good glimpse of his face. What he saw did not impress him. "She's right—you look like shit. You're in no shape to fight," he said with an eyebrow quirked up.

"I will not see you injured for this," said Cassandra.

But Cullen was not so easily discouraged and with great aggravation, he asked of them, "So do we stop and save my life at the risk of the monster taking more? It hardly cares about my health."

"You're an _idiot_," Rylen muttered and rolled his eyes.

Thereupon the distance he heard a bark echoing through, not that far off and—when he heard it a second time—steadily it was coming closer. Dane was returning. He began walking from his companions toward the barking, determined to let such annoying talk die there.

Then Jim, in a small and quivering voice, spoke up, "M-maybe. Maybe, Ser, they're right; i-it would be for the best. Ser Meredith will understand, she could—she could send another—"

"Enough!" Cullen snapped and the force of it carried through the unnervingly silent forest like the crack of the whip, as if it was the only sound that was allowed to exist within the darken realm. And the thought of that might've given the Knight some pause if he was thinking right, because he knew a quiet forest, any _truly_ quiet forest, was never a good sign—for it meant that the forest had noticed that mortals dwelled within it and it was stalking them with all one hundred of its eyes. But Cullen was not thinking right, as he was wheeling toward Jim in a wave of barely constrained rage, his brown eyes swirling into an unforgiving black that burned through the frightened boy. "I did not ask for your useless presumptions, _recruit_. You need to learn to silence yourself, lest you make my headache worse!"

The pain in his skull swirled like boiling water and drew out his anger, but at what or at who? It was directionless, yet it spanned all around: at this boy, at Rylen, at Cassandra, at the lindworm, at the dryness of his own mouth, begging for more of that liquid song—but what he was angriest at was the disgrace the mention of _her_ name unearthed; that he was failing and proving her right once again.

He blinked and at the edge of his vision he thought he saw _her_ pale blue eyes, judging him for all his inadequacy. She was a shadow clinging to a tree like a vine, whispering _'I knew it, I knew you could not endure, I knew…'_ and Cullen wanted to whirl toward her, shout at the top of his lungs, plunge his sword deep into her neck and slice her vocal cords—

Something hard grasped his shoulder and Cullen's feet hit the ground as if he had never been touching it at all. He blinked and everything came back into focus, the whispering and the eyes gone. Vaguely, he was aware it was Cassandra touching him if only because no one else would dare to, not when he was like this. He was still glaring at Jim, watching as the boy fought against his collapsing face and his tearful eyes.

Rylen had stepped between the two with an arm cautiously out-Cullen didn't even realize how close he had gotten or that he was looming over the boy, fists at his side. "Cullen, that's…"

Jim cut him off; a sloppy and confused jumble dropped from his mouth, his eyes cast down. "—I'm…sorry, Ser. I didn't…I…"

He felt Cassandra's hand squeeze him and in an instant, the searing guilt came hurling down upon him. Maker, what was he _doing_? An unpleasant taste welled up in Cullen's mouth as he brushed his friend's hand away and stepped back from Jim, turning his mortified eyes anywhere else. His headache pounded on and he was beginning to think the only relief he'd ever get from it would be if he ripped his own eyes from his sockets.

"It's…" He swallowed what tasted like blood, failing to find the right words or even the will to apologize. As he struggled, he felt something nudge its way under his hand and lick his palm. A whine and then it butted his leg gently, quietly announcing itself. Cullen looked down and sighed, entirely too relieved to have Dane return to him. Those big black eyes peered up at him, reminding him of who he was and what he was doing—that, at the very least, he was nothing else but this mabari's master and friend. It was something to own proudly.

Chancing a glance at Jim and then at Rylen's grimace, Cullen closed his eyes and shook his head, "…leave it be, all of you. We do not have the daylight to waste on this. We move forward." He flicked his head, giving permission for the mabari to start leading the way, doing his best to look no one in the eye, "I assure you I will be ready to face the creature when it comes time. You have my word." He said the last part softly, intending it more for Cassandra than the rest but still he refused to look at her, choosing instead to follow after Dane.

It took her a long time to answer in a voice just as soft as his, "…I know I do…" and then she walked on by his side with the other two close behind.

The group tracked on through the hedges and flora with little inkling of where they were being taken. With great wariness they held themselves tight, fully aware that the forest was still awake to them and had absorbed their presence with a giddy fascination. Dark and invisible, the gusts of ghosts followed after them, climbing through branches, dancing from shadow to shadow, giggling as they pressed their feet into the deep prints they left in their wake. Chattering and rustling among themselves, they observed the travelers only from afar, trying as they may to enchant them with their songs and promises of magic gifts and impossible dreams. Braver ones might throw colorful stones shaped like rubies and sapphires at their feet but the travelers kept their heads forward the farther they went and their sight only on the mabari.

One such creature lingered far too close to Jim in an attempt to whisper in his ear but Dane stopped abruptly and growled at it threateningly. With no tangible body and certainly no mouth, it let out a disembodied shrill shriek that wormed its way into each of the mortals' ears and turned their insides to an excruciating ice. Cullen's headache worsened but he showed little of it as he patted Dane's head; they forged on and the spirits did not approach them again, frightened as they were by the blasted mabari.

Deeper they traveled among the tall, imposing trees and as they did, the wetter it became. The soil turned to muck that clung to the soles of their boots and it was so dark, so thick, that if one let themselves think too long, they might have thought they were trudging along a path of black blood left behind to pool.

And _Maker_—they could very well be doing so if this was the path the lindworm had created when it took those twelve people into its mouth, settled them in its belly, and slithered away from the unfortunate village in the dead of night. It had done so at the gates, on the stone floor, along the wooden buildings; a scene of splattered red and poison sprayed along wall and ground alike, eroding all away with a reek so noxious it killed some poor woman on the spot.

Think too hard and it is not mud they were ankle deep in and not twigs they were snapping but the innards of the people they might have saved and—if not— were now obligated to avenge.

_**Look, look, look, look**_**,** the ghosts from afar chanted at them and cackled, _**look, look, look, look, look**_.

Do not look down, they each told themselves and blocked out the noise, do not think it real or the forest will make it so.

Say your prayers to Andraste now, that she might give these people peace and justice, and then march on.

They went on as the day went on, the sun moving across the sky and slowly turning the light to a diming orange that could barely cut through the dense brush above them. It was as the later afternoon arrived that Dane lead them past a couple of trees that had been splintered at the middle of their trunk and collapsed on top of each other, the tangle of their flourish a stubborn wall they had to slice through.

On the other side sat a swallow river that rushed along serenely, hidden from the normal trail. Cassandra nodded at it when she and Cullen exchanged looks; on the bank was a smear of brownish, rusted red and something that might have been flesh once now turned to a wet pile of mush. Dane sniffed at it and then turned away with a disgusted huff. They were close.

Down the river they went, keeping to the line of trees to cover their forms, keeping their footsteps light and soundless. The stream led itself to a cliff and poured off the side of it into a graying mist, the hollow below blanketed in darkness. Near this edge was a long, grand crag adorned with yellow and the most vibrant green moss, blooming at its top an array of dandelions lucky to be born in a bright ray of sunshine—and in this crag there was a gaping hole, pitch black and unfathomable and soaking at its opening like a drooling mouth, but before they saw that they smelled the potent stench of diseased rot and all went staggering away.

It was the lindworm's nest, for you see _only_ a lindworm would make its nest out of dripping skin and decomposing meat. It's a question among scholars why they behave as they do. Lindworms were naturally large creatures, though skinner than its cousins the dragon and wyvern, its stomach long and stretching to fit some thirty-odd men if it was greedy, yet none ever ate its victims whole. No, rather than swallow them and let them settle in its intestines, the lindworm carried its meals to its nest and vomited them out, coated in its poisonous acid. And if the Maker was kind, the victim would have died from lack of air or a broken neck; if not, then they lived as the acid corroded their body from skin, to meat, to vein, to organ, to bone and they felt their nerves burn to nothing and saw their limbs soften and turn to mush. And these poor souls can do nothing but scream, scream, _scream_ until even their lungs and their throat collapsed into a liquid as thick as stew.

Some say the lindworm likes to watch the whole ordeal; that it finds a certain deliciousness in its meal's misery. A salt to add to the fleshy slop before it decides to devour all.

It was a death few would give their worst enemies.

Careful of its teeth, careful of its breath, careful of its skin and its tongue; a dragon has blood lit aflame and will kindly kill you quick, but a lindworm was born amidst corpses and will make you witness death into _eternity_—that is what one is taught when they first hear that beast's dreadful name.

No harrowing moan nor no other noise came from the cave. The Knights and squire, with arms and hands covering their noses and months, looked at each other and quietly assumed all those taken were indeed dead.

When this hunt was done, they would make a pyre for what was left.

"Smell's too strong here. Must be a big one." Rylen said as he moved farther back into the shade of the trees and grasped through his pack, "Masks on, mates"

The masks he spoke were leather-bound, shaped like the beak of a hawk with holes at the bottom for air, and was strapped to the head by a belt at the back of the neck. Inside the cavity of the mask, they had mashed in different strong-scented herbs as to protect their senses: lavender, embrium, mint leaves, the petals of a dawn lotus, and prophet's laurel. As they each began to secure their masks, Cullen got his knees and took out a smaller mask for Dane. The mabari dutifully wiggled its muzzle into the beak as Cullen scratched him behind the ears and locked the belt.

At least now none of them would be at risk of intaking too much of the lindworm's breath and having their lungs crumble away. The strong smells overwhelmed Cullen's nose and his body didn't seem to agree with it, his head hammering away in protest, but he got his feet and pushed past it.

With little indication besides the slight nod that all were ready, Cassandra unsheathed her sword and fastened her shield to her forearm, bending at the knee to cover her body with it. The three men followed suit. Together they left the trees and walked through the river to the other side, pressing themselves against the stone wall. Dane growled from behind his mask and crouched into an offensive stance as Cassandra took the instinctive to peer inside the cave.

Despite the plentiful sunlight, it was too dark to see within the cavern. Still, they heard something skidding across a wet floor, hissing at their noise, and when it saw Cassandra's face, two eyes blared a sickening yellow as it snapped its teeth at her.

A warning; leave me to my meal or become it.

Cassandra extended her hand back towards the others without taking her eyes off the creature. Jim produced a confusion grenade from his pack and lit the wick. Hesitant as it boiled and bubbled violently to a purple hue, he planted it in her hand.

Taking a deep breath and then inhaling through her nose, Cassandra gripped the grenade tightly as she drew her arm back and then pitched it into the cave.

"Move _**now**_!"

A whirl of lilac smoke and a burst of fire exploded from the cave as the group all spread out and hid behind their shields. The lindworm screeched in its outrage and confusion, and the sound shook the trees, tremored through the rocks, made the birds scatter their voices across the sky, and brought the world to a trembling stand-still—as if even the dirt could have nightmares of such a thing. It burst from the smolder with its mouth unhinged and split far down its neck, as wide as a trap door, and hanging from the inside of it was hundreds of tiny razor teeth, its longest fangs protruding from the front of its mouth, and one long sliced tongue. It knotted itself at first, long tail-end rolling over miles and miles of body, but as it rolled itself out, it rose up on its two hind legs—the only limbs it had, the sort you'd expect on an eagle with talons just as deadly—and extended itself high above the crag, its head taller than the trees, bigger than a boulder.

Its silver scales gleamed in the sun's falling light, at its spine were ridges the stunning color of nevarrite. Upon its head was a crown of six glittering horns; made of crystals so breathtaking, no queen's circlet could ever think to compare. But all that beauty mattered not, for its dazzled body was smeared in a profuse blacken blood and caught in its scales were pieces of flesh and shards of bone. It wore the remnants of its victims with all the grandeur of a noble adorned in makeup and jewelry with little care of the prices such things came with.

Its seven eyes still rendered sightless by the smoke, the lindworm searched for the source of its distress by turning its head about, spewing its venom in all directions. Raising his shield above his head, Cullen beat the ground with the hilt of his sword and from him flowed a blessed blue glow that spread out to his companions and toward the lindworm.

It hit the creature's belly in a wave, like a tide against a shoreline, and the creature roared at it, unhurt but insulted by these mortal's audacity to touch it with such things. Flinging open the eye which resigned at the center of its face, it lunged its entire body at Cullen. He and Dane parred out of its way, splashing their way back into the river, and narrowly dodged the swing of its tail.

Digging its talons into the bed of the river, the lindworm stopped itself from crashing its head into a tree and turned toward Rylen just as he attempted to bring his shield down on its nose. Opening its mouth, it bit down on the iron just before he could make contact with it and held firmly onto it as Rylen struggled to yank it and his still-connected arm away. As it did this, it did not notice as a large iron chain whipped its way around three of its horns—it, however, did give a high pitched shriek as Cassandra pulled the chain taut and forced its head to come toward her. She sliced a clean gash just under its jaw as Dane took advantage of its body being lowered to the ground and jumped on its back, hooking his claws into it. Bound by the chain, the lindworm could do little more than let go of Rylen and thrashed its body wildly in an attempt to free itself.

The others attacked its sides, Jim grabbing his own chain to aid in tying the creature down while Cullen built up his power and charged into it with his shield, using the sharpen edges to cut its body.

The lindworm was crying, fanatically withering against these small ants who thought they were powerful enough to hold it down, and it howled, striking the nearest fool with its still free tail. That fool was Jim; focused solely on locking it down, he never saw the tail coming. It smashed into his rib cage and wrapped around his torso, lifting him high into the air with little trouble.

"Shit-! Let g—" Jim could only yell so much before his very breath was cut off, the tail snaking over his chest and around his neck. Gasping, he kicked and squirm uselessly as the lindworm dangled him back and forth and then it set its teeth as if smiling and brought the boy down onto Cassandra with all the might of a comet descending into the planet.

Futilely, Cassandra tried to catch Jim and stay on her feet but in the end, she could do little more than hold her arms up and have him crash into her. The force of it threw the two back against the wall of the crag and even with all the chaos, one could still make out the distinct sound of Cassandra's skull banging against the rock.

She spewed blood from her nose and Jim gasped as he tried to brace himself against the stone, only sob out pathetically when he felt his left arm _crack_.

Free now, the lindworm rose onto its legs and vomited a mouthful of acid at Rylen, forgetting for the moment the dog still on its back and the other man still cutting his way up its side. "Maker's—_shit_!" Swore Rylen from behind his shield, for the bile had flooded intensely and too swift—and over his iron the acid came, cascading down his shoulder. It fizzled and popped, devouring fast past his armor and clothing, and he swore again when it soaked into his skin and ate it raw.

_Fuck_, Rylen's fought to keep his vision straight as the burn of his melting skin engulfed the right side of his chest and spread fast through his nerves, making the fingers gripping his sword numb, knowing its scent was all over him—that rather than an enemy, he reeked of a _meal_. The lindworm opened all of its slit eyes wide and focused down on him, making a sound born between a chuckle and a shrill keen.

_My scent, my taste, my meat,_ it appeared to say as its tongue flickered out of its mouth, _my __**FOOD**__!_

The lindworm opened its mouth and dashed toward the injured human with an ear-piercing screech—but as it did, a new chain bound around its neck and yanked it back, tearing the gurgling sound from it. Cullen held the chain firmly with one hand, refusing to budge from the creature's back as it pulled and pulled, bending its spine back toward him.

"Dane!" He yelled up, "Eyes! Go for its eyes!"

The mabari did just that; down from its horns he descended onto the lindworm's face, overwhelming its middle eye with his claws and the bashing of his head.

Cullen wound the chain tighter around his hand, losing his hold momentarily when his headache sent a white surge of pain through his skull, and called out, "Cassandra!"

"I know!" She yelled back as she ran through the water and over to Rylen's side. Struggling to keep on his feet, it was her touch that abruptly had his legs giving out from under him. He slumped heavily against her, the grip on his sword going lax. "Can't…breathe…" He muttered and reached for his mask but Cassandra stopped his hand.

"Hold on..." She told him, spitting the overflowing blood, and from her pack produced a potion. Yanking the crock out with her teeth, she forced Rylen's mask up enough to push the bottle up to his lips and made him drink.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Cullen and Dane losing their struggle to subdue the lindworm. It shook its head in every direction, slamming Dane into the nearest trees until the poor thing couldn't hold on anymore and was flung down into the water with a yelp. Cullen cursed, again winching as his head pounded on and screwed with his eyes and balance. Letting out a savage roar, he stabbed his sword into the lindworm's spine and twisted it, praying that he had hit some vital organ.

But rather than slowing it down, the act only seemed to exasperate the creature and give it a new reason to loathe this tiny, annoying insect. It snapped at Cullen, wringing its neck around to do so, but when it realized it could not reach him, the creature reared its body and—

_**SLAM**_

—it smashed Cullen between its ridge spine and the crag's wall, squeezing the life out of him until he had no other choice but to let go and free the creature.

The rock sliced his cheek and forehead open as he slid down and hit the floor, the bones of his rib cage splintering and stabbing him within. Hot blood dripped down the side of his face and into his eyes as he coughed, scraping his hands against anything to give him the leverage to move. His hands and legs trembling, failing to find purchase in the wall, but he refused to stay still or to listen to his failing body even as it begged him to.

White ran along the edges of his sight, eating his vision away, and he knew if he allowed him to give in, his consciousness would escape him.

Peering through his blood, he saw the lindworm snarling as it broke his chain with its teeth, and then it was turning back to Rylen and Cassandra.

_Fuck, shit—Void take it, this shouldn't have—they had miscalculated—they weren't—_

"Cullen!" He heard Cassandra yelled, "We must retreat!"

Retreat? Maker, no. He couldn't—he had to get this done. He—Another miserable surge struck him between the eyes and Cullen couldn't tell what felt worse—his head or his shattered body.

No sword. Still a shield. He could—he could still fight!

"Not yet!" He yelled back, "I will stay and—!"

The lindworm's howl drowned out all the noise around them as blood sprung from its mouth and rained down from the sky. Cullen stared in bewilderment, searching for a cause, and then he noticed that the river was turning red from a trail of blood. His eyes followed that trail down the length of the monster's trembling body until he looked where its tail used to be.

Now, it was a stump, sliced cleanly by a bright blue blade, blessed by a surge of lyrium, and who else was holding it but Jim—Jim with his shaking knees, and his bloodied face, his terrified eyes, and an arm that was so broken it could only dangle uselessly from his side as he pointed the sword at the monster's back.

His feet only inches from the edge of the cliff.

Jim took his eyes off the monster for only a second to look back at Cullen, meeting his stunned gaze with a small, fearful smile—fearful because he realized that he had just signed his death warrant and_ this_ was what the Maker intended his death to be.

_This_ lindworm—blood and acid leaking out of its mouth, turning its injured eyes toward him and thinking of all the ways it was going to mutilate his body before it obliterated everything he ever was.

He raised the sword higher, stood his ground as bravely as any full-fledged knight, and prayed: _With my eyes closed…yet I see…The Light is here…_.

Jim was ready to die—at the tender age of twenty, this bloody fool was giving himself over to the Maker.

_No_, Cullen thought and, then, he ran.

If he was healthy, if he wasn't haggard and weak, if he wasn't _Cullen_, then he might have grabbed Jim's sword and stuck its blade down the lindworm's throat. If he was someone else, someone better, but he wasn't anyone else and all that he had to offer in that one split second was his body—and so the lindworm took him instead of Jim.

The fangs speared through his armor and skin as effortless as a knife through butter and from there, the acid flowed in. Agony enveloped each of his nerves, robbing him of basic sense, as the beast lifted him by the stomach and chewed down until its teeth came out from the other side of him. Shock had rendered him speechless, his screaming a dying rasp from his agape mouth. If he cried, he could not feel the tears falling down over his cheeks. Even his hearing had become muffled, the roaring of his own fanatic heartbeat drowning out any cries of his name—if his companions were even saying that much to begin with.

All he had left of him was his sight, blurred by colors and light as the lindworm tossed him about, ravaging him like Dane does with his toys, smashing him repeatedly against stone and ground, because it wasn't enough to be killed for this thing to be sated—oh no, it needed him torn at the seams, bloodied, and marred before it decided it good enough to swallow him down.

On his tongue was a prayer, asking Andraste to guide him someplace safe and warm.

At that moment he heard a familiar snarl and opened his eyes to see Dane, black fur ridden with bloody and green claw marks, on the lindworm's head without his mask on—his teeth deep in the creature's cheek.

"Dane!" He gasped, trying to reach for him, to command him away; he could die, Maker, Dane could **die**. _Please, no!_ He wanted to cry but the blood filled his mouth. _Please don't let Dane come with me!_

But Dane held on with all his strength as the lindworm whipped its head repeatedly, biting down harder on Cullen's body as it did, and snapped itself so fast that it could not hold on to its victim any longer. Cullen felt the teeth wrench out of him as he was suddenly hurled out of the lindworm's mouth and sent flying through the air.

Jim, having been shoved to the side when Cullen took his place, watched in growing horror as the Knight was flung across the sky and over the cliff. He moved to get back on his feet but his legs wouldn't listen, only letting him crawl on his knees to the edge. He wished his arms were longer, or that maybe he could float even for a second, because maybe if he had, then he could have reached Cullen before he fell deep down into the pit of the forest and was eaten by its darkness.

"Ser Rutherford!" He screamed but there came no answer except for the lindworm's shriek.

The monster writhed above, coiling its stomach around itself as it slammed to the ground. Dane jumped off it, dropping from his mouth one of its mangled eyes. Over on the other side of it, Cassandra struggled with holding Rylen up and keeping him lucid enough to walk. Regret seeped over her features as her brain replayed Cullen's fall over and over and over again, the look on his drained face just before he vanished.

She squeezed her eyes shut and looked back towards the forest.

There wasn't much time with the creature down now, she knew. Rylen was dying but he could be saved easily if they used this window to escape now and sent a raven out to the Inquisition for help. Keep walking, keep pumping him full with all the potions they had, they could keep him alive—but doing that meant leaving Cullen's body in the forest to be feasted on and tainted by the unknown.

It meant leaving a _friend_.

But no. _No._ She lost one good man—she would not lose another.

"Jim! Dane!" She shouted and the boy turned his head to attention, tears streaking down his face. No time for that. Dane, on the other hand, had not moved from peering down at the cliff, "We retreat—now!"

She didn't bother to wait for him. Cassandra picked Rylen up by most of his weight and ordered him to move his legs. Without looking back, they marched back into the safety of the undergrowth and she thanked the Maker when she heard clumsy footsteps coming from behind her.

It wasn't until they were safe that she noticed it was only Jim who had followed.

* * *

Mist. Darkness. A violent stream. These were the things that greeted him at the bottom of the void.

It was only a small consolation that he felt nothing when he hit the water's surface. The acid had turned him numb to such things; besides, how much broken could a man be? He inhaled air as his head bobbed above the water instinctively but once he was under again, it was lost to him. Down, down, _down_ in that pitch blackness, the cage of his mind rattled and opened and out of it crawled his nightmares on all fours, groping at his limbs, laughing seductively in his ear, taking him back down, down, _down_—to that _**hole**_.

_No, please, Maker, I beg you. Not there again!_

Reality and memory blurred and Cullen was caught in the current, unable to breathe.

Was it water filling his mouth or blood?

Was it the crash of the stream in his ear or the torment shriek of friends being slaughtered?

Was it he fighting against boulders with pointed edges or the claws of demons trying to squirm like worms under his skin?

Maker, Maker, Maker! Where _was_ he? Was he dead or did he never leave that terrifying place, deep in the earth, lined with gore, where no Light can ever reach?

Maker, Maker, Maker! If you will not answer him, then what will?

Maker, Maker, Maker! Don't abandon him now!

_Maker, Maker, Maker! PLEASE!_

_**SAVE ME.**_

Perhaps it was the natural fear in him to run from those demons, real or not, that had him wrestling with the stream rather than giving in. Blinded, he grasped and groped and dug and scratched for something to hold on to as he was dragged down the way; mask, pieces of armor, shield, and cloak lost in the battle. His knuckles and fingers bled from being torn from ground and stone just as he latched onto them and he would cry out, sobbing for mercy or for death.

And then he found something—a stone too massive to be taken from, a patch of sand and then dirt too dry to slip away out of his fingers, grass to knot his fists in as he pulled himself out. He clung to it with what little of his life he had left, bloodied face pressed into the mud, and sighed as the smell of wet earth embraced him.

Finally, one way or another, he found some peace, dying as he was—and so he closed his eyes and ceased to be.

His body laid in this lonely valley for quite some time while the trees rustled and the fireflies buzzed, asking each other where this ruined creature had come from. Why was he tainting their quiet home? In this place, hidden so far from the sunlight, the wind came to visit him and kindly ran itself through his matted hair.

Then, a hand touched his cheek. Pale, transparent, disembodied; it nudged him and when he exhaled softly, it disappeared in what might have been fright.

In a breath, the hand swelled back into existence and with it was another hand and two arms. With great tenderness, these ownerless limbs lifted the poor man's face and turned him on his back. From the gashes on his stomach oozed his blood and a smoke, the venom still working through the core of him.

The hand touched his wound and tried to grasp the smoke, but nothing came of it.

There was a heart-wrenching gasp and a voice spoke above the body, "Dark. Wet. Feeding me things. I can't see the surface. I have been forsaken by the Maker. Sinking—no, hands on my face, on my feet, on my hips, pulling me down. No, don't go down." The voice was that of a boy—weak, terrified, he spoke as if he was made of glass but there was earnestness in him, a sweet concern for this man. "Stay above. I'll help you. I can help you. Do not go down. Listen! _Listen_!"

The voice echoed desperately, bouncing off the trees and the vastness around it, scaring the fireflies away, and the hands pulled away from the smoking body and floated towards the brush, saying over and over again, "Listen! Listen! Stay! Listen!" It left; whatever it was fading in the shade and leaves, leaving no trace of who or what it was.

Minutes later, the voice was back and this time it was a haze of pale iridescence, flowing through the air like water. "Let me help. Do not let go. Listen! _She _can help."

"Cole. Your hat. You have become air again. Your hat."

A husky, hollowed tone followed as a slip of an witch emerged from beyond the trees with a shabby shroud of blue wrapped around her, filthy as her skin and the thick nest of gray hair that covered her face and eyes. Secure on her back was a sturdy branch of driftwood, longer than her own tall body, adorned in ribbons and charms and brightly colored stones that twitched lights—and must have been heavy, because she walked with the hunch of an old woman, dragging her feet as if they weighed a ton.

The haze made a sound at her like it was sucking air through his teeth and said, "He's going deep, deeper than I—"

In both her hands she cradled a wide-brimmed hat with a great many stitches and patches; she lifted it up to show the voice. "_Hat_, Cole."

The haze hesitated and then glided to her. She raised it high and placed the hat on top of it, and in an instant the haze morphed into the figure of a young boy—pale as milk, stringy white-blonde hair clinging to his sharp face, his eyes the color of a blue one could never see, never truly understand, unless they opened their eyes up at the bottom of an icy lake as they were freezing to death.

He was a fragile creature, wispy and still much too translucent, only real enough to hold his hat on his head because he focused on it.

He touched the flap hanging over his eyes and said with some relief, "Thank you," but his mind and eyes were still connected to someplace else and he was veering around soon enough. "He's down there. I have to pull him out."

The witch shifted slightly, "A corpse. That is where you lead me."

"No. Breathing. Crying out. Let me out. _Let me out_. He is somewhere dark and dank but he isn't. He is…here." Even with a pair of seemingly working legs, the boy floated towards the man and crouched into a ball near him, the length of his hat casting a shadow over his face. He extended his long hand fingers over the smoke and once again tried to catch it. "He is scared. And hurt. Everything burns. We can make it stop, can't we?"

He turned his face to look at her but the witch had ducked her head down, her hair a shield against his eyes. Her body was alert as she regarded the man and came near; she held herself as uneasy as a wild animal would, guarded and waiting for the danger to strike, ready to either scamper off at a moment's notice or take her claws and sink them into his neck. Still, she bent to her knee and flicked the hair from the man's face. "Mortal." She stated with indifference and let her staff slip from her back and quietly put it by her side.

Cradling his head in her hands, the witch examined his features with great scrutiny; she ran her fingers down his cheeks and over his wounds, pulling his eyelids up, opening his mouth to see the blood dripping from it. She rubbed the palm of her hand over his beard and down the line of his jaw, checking for the familiar feel of a pulse throbbing along. When she found it, she hummed and muttered something under her breath.

The head was still intact. Good.

Her hands moved down to what was left of his breastplate and to his tarnished stomach—the venom had dissolved most of the metal and all of the fabric underneath. Now, it was eating through the open gash, searing its way far past the muscles and into any bone and organ it could find. When the witch fanned her hand over the wound and pressed down on, forcing blood up through the joints of her fingers, Cullen did not make a sound—she, however, yanked her hand away when the smoke wrapped around her wrist and hissed.

She waved her hand about and rubbed it into the cool grass by her leg. "Lindworm spit. It covers him and he reeks." She peered up into the darkness above, curling and uncurling her fingers, wondering if the creature in question had followed its meal.

No, she would have heard it. Lindworms are too, too, _too_ loud. They made a mess.

"It hurts him. He needs help. You can help." The boy said.

The witch didn't say anything to that. She wiped her hands on her dirty skirt and fisted her hands in it, trying to keep them steady—keeping herself grounded—and then she dipped her hand under her shroud and yanked from the thread-bare belt around her waist a knife. The blade had no shine to it; it was rusted, strain with black and brown and red, and the edge was a tad dull, no good for cutting through wood or the like.

But. It would have to do for cutting skin.

She lifted the man's neck and pressed the knife just above his adam's apple; one slice and he would be gone.

Cole's eyes shot out of his head and he moved to grab her hand, "No! I said to help! This is _not_ helping!" but his hand could only pretend to hold her, ghosting around her wrist.

Still, for whatever reason, it stopped her from moving. "He is dying. Dead. I am helping him. Lindworm spit is a terrible death."

"You can heal him."

She shook her head and forced the blade closer to the man's skin. "No, I can't. I am bad at it. Very bad. This is a better heal. And his head is still good—cut it off and I can save the eyes, the tongue, the—"

"You have a way." The boy flew out of his ball and for a moment, he was wrapping around her, a hurricane of misting air. In the next, he was in front of her, looking at her through her hair, and angrily he said, "Antidote. Patience. I heard once. I saw. You can heal him. You are meant to! You promised."

But she did not move her hand. "It is different. He is dying, not lost."

There was a tsk from the boy, his face twisted up with his frustration and pain—as if the poison was affected him as much as it was affecting this man. If he was so far gone in this mortal's mind, then maybe it was. He floated back from her, putting his head in his hands and then between his knees. "Lies. Lies. Lost in the hole. He's going too deep and he can't find a way out. Went off the path. Can't find a new one. He came here—he came to _you_." He snapped his head up and pointed at her. "You can _heal_ him."

The witch flattened her lips into a straight line, struggling to keep her grip on the knife's handle steady. He was right. Where she couldn't heal this man magically, she could do it through herbs and medicine. She could grant him a pocket of time to rebuild himself.

She did not want to do this, however.

A mortal man was no good to her, bringing with him troubles as soon as she allowed him through her door—but his head? His head had things she could work with. His head was worth far more than anything he could give her healed and set back on the right path.

But furthermore, there was this: "Mortals are meant to die, Cole."

It was as she shoved the tip of the knife into the man's throat that across the lake something massive came barreling through. Had she been any slower, it might have completely overtaken her but the witch sprung quickly out of the thing's reach and with a swap of her hand, a current of electric blue struck down from the sky, keeping whatever it was and she parted.

Cole darted after her, almost turning back into a haze out of panic, and hovered over her shoulder. "A friend." He said after a beat.

A large dog, flank riddled with angry slices and red teeth exposed in a ruthless snarl, had thrown itself in front of the mortal man protectively. It was injured, dreadfully so; its legs had begun to shake and though it gave no indication of it, it must have suffered a great deal to get to this man's side. Yet, it snarled and refused to be ignored.

With the subtle flick of her index finger, the sparkling magic dispersed without so much as a _'crack!_', leaving nothing between her and the dog. The witch did not move. Rather, she kept both her hands up to her face, the knife still in her hand, letting the dog follow her every movement.

"Friend. That is what you called him. He is a friend?" She asked Cole.

"Yes…he feels like a friend. An angry friend." He answered and when the dog looked at him with defensively, he leaned closer to her and added, "I don't think he likes what you tried to do…"

The witch hummed, then she slowly lowered herself to the ground, stopping every time the dog growled before she sent on. As her knees touched the grass, she stabbed the knife into the dirt so that he may see where it was placed. Then, sitting on her heels, the witch tried to move closer to the creature with her hand extended out towards him.

"That is your human, yes?"

A growl.

She stopped. "I will not hurt him." She offered her hand to him, "May I touch you? You are injured. I want to help."

Wary as he was, the dog instinctively backed out of her reach and made a rough sound deep in his throat, inclining his head away. But there was no denying that he was in pain and soon, it appeared he had stopped mulling over trusting her and decided to give in. Creeping closer, he brushed his nose against her fingers, sniffing her palm and licking it, and when he decided she was no longer a threat, he pressed his head into her hand and whined softly. The witch scratched him gently behind the ears and when he happily relaxed into that, she brought her other hand up to scratch him under the jaw.

She smoothed her hand down the sloop of his neck to his back where his injuries laid and, just as she had done with the human, she pressed down on the cut and saw the smoke raise up and hissed at her. The dog whimpered in her hold and panted; he opened his mouth and she could see the same smoke coming off his tongue, the roof of his mouth scorched by acid. But he did not swallow what he had bitten and that may be why he was still able to stand on his own feet.

For now, anyway.

"Come. I will put you right." She told him, but the dog looked at her with his big black eyes and then turned away from her. He went back to where he belonged—by the man's side, where he licked his face and laid down on his shoulder.

"See. He wants you to help, too. Help. Heal. It's what you can do."

The witch bunched her skirt up in her fingers as Cole floated and sat down cross-legged by the dog. The creature was so tired—or perhaps he realized this boy posed no threat—that he did not react to him as he continued to stare at the witch with pleading eyes.

"He's _dying_." She said but knew it didn't matter; she was fighting a losing battle with these two. She racked her fingers through her hair, yanking on it harshly, looked to the dog, and asked, "There is a price for saving a life. Would you pay it? For him?"

The answer she received was a soft but certain bark, and she watched as the dog looked upon his mortal man and licked his face again lovingly. It was all the answer she truly needed.

With little left to say to that, the witch got to her feet and walked towards the three. She plunked her knife from the ground and placed it back in her belt, then reached down to pick her staff up. From one of the ribbons hung a skinny wooden whistle, which the witch gently blew into. It made no sound but by its call, there came a chorus of thuds from the wall of trees. A hart the color of hay appeared, weaving his way through the thicket and strode over to her side. He bumped his head against her shoulder when she touched his snout and scratched it affectionately.

"Hello, Hulk. Carry this for me."

She pointed to the mortal and the hart blew hot air in her face, bucking in refusal at the very idea. He wasn't some witless cattle, after all! He tried to get away but the witch knotted her fingers in his fur, keeping him there without looking back at him.

"It is unpleasant, I know, but you will do it. Payment is payment. You owe me, yes? Yes."

The hart grunted and beat his hooves into the dirt stubbornly. He turned a critical eye towards Cole, knowing full well that the boy, as usual, had something to do with this nonsense.

Cole simply waved pleasantly at him.

Hulk snorted unhappily and pushed at her shoulder again but when she didn't let go or even acknowledge his tantrum, the hart gave a long sigh and finally relented, turning himself around to let her do as she pleased.

He'd let her know he was against this the entire way back, though, he'd make sure of that.

All that settled, the witch turned to the dog and motion for him to get up. "I will need to move him. Do not worry. He is safe." As the dog stood, the witch gracefully waved a hand through the air and with it, wisps of magic flowed from her fingertips and to the body. Draping around each of his limbs, she gestured the magic to lift him from the grass and up the air, then she let him drift towards Hulk and carefully put him on his back, blood and all dripping over his coarse fur.

Putting her staff on her back, the witch walked up to Hulk and placed a hand on his neck. "Cole. Are you coming?"

The boy floated up so fast that his hat fell through his now completely transparent body, but he didn't seem to notice. "Yes. We can help him now. He won't go so deep." He began to hover towards her.

"Cole. Hat."

"Hat?" He touched his bare head and looked back, "Oh, yes. Hat." He grabbed it and when he did, his body became more solid, and then he flew past the dog, Hulk, the witch and into the forest. The witch patted the hart's neck twice, whispering for him to go, but as he began the track through the trees—kicking dirt back at her for good measure—she stayed and waited patiently for the dog to catch up.

"Tired, yes? It's alright. I will stay with you."

Resting her hand on the top of the dog's head, the witch led him into the dark undergrowth where the only light they had to guide them were the fireflies that had returned and lingered about.


	4. The Cost of Starlight

**Warning:** This chapter deals with suicidal thoughts and implications, extreme violence, gore, drug withdrawal, drug use (both in the form of magic), and implied past sexual assault. If you are in any way sensitive to this material, please proceed with caution.

* * *

**Part IV: The Cost of Starlight**

The home of the Birch Wood Witch was kept not exactly in the heart of the forest but more in its liver, where few would expect it to be. This was by design, for such a dreary corner escaped the eye of many tiresome beings, save for those who were invited or stumbled on the lost path. Hers was a quiet little clearing nestled in a circle of full-headed trees, shaded more than lit by the presence of the sun or moons sailing overhead. The ruins of a single tower sprouted from the uneven grass, its once brilliant ivory stones cropped to half its height and crawling with vines. Its outside had been cracked open like that of an eggshell; a hole at the bottom revealing a crumbling set of stairs and another on the roof, which was stuffed with hay and sticks and cotton fluff.

Kept in her mind's eye, this was the tower which guided the witch and her party through the vast darkness of the woods.

It called, perhaps in a whisper across the back of her neck, and she answered with a sure foot, walking as if pulled by a rope around her waist. Cole and Hulk trod ahead in the same wise manner, neither making a din among the twisting twigs, seeds, and roots—though from the ghostly boy streamed the broken jabber of the mortal man's mind and his own pleads for him to _"not go any deeper, stay out of the hole, don't go, don't go"._

"Cole, no more…" the witch would rasp, the grate of his voice a drill in her ears.

He did not stop, however, or perhaps it was that he_ could_ not, his head flooded by the moans of agony and his mouth the only opening from which they could escape.

This nothing more than exacerbate the mabari at her side, who faltered on his weak legs, matching bloodied steps behind the witch's footprints. Despite this, he appeared determined to put up a brave front. He strained to walk with the unburdened posture of a healthy war hound—refusing to relax his wounded back or let his head rest on her chest as she caught him in her arms and saved him from collapsing time and again. Even her slowing down was met with a miffed growl, the action more of a plain insult to his pride than all his injuries combined.

The witch let this be, despite making the journey all the more slow-going. Leave the slighted thing his dignity.

He allowed her to keep her hand on top of his head, however, and when she would scratch his ears encouragingly, he did not snub her touch.

At long last, they came to a tight thicket of birch trees. With a swish of the witch's hand, they bowed back from one another and revealed to her the starlit clearing. Small buzzes were the only sounds in the whole of this place; hums from the fireflies which lingered close in the grass and the orbs she had cast for light.

The witch glanced off to her left as she helped the dog and Hulk over the threshold where the land rose into a small hill. A creek flowed out into a puddle of a lake; she saw the reflection of the orbs' lights twinkling at her in the water's ripples as the wind breezed by.

"Stop, Hulk."

The hart answered with a brisk snort and obliged her. It couldn't have been better timing as it seemed Hulk's notoriously needle thin temperament was edging on his wit's end.

Cole whirled about the hart's head like a pesky bug, droning on and on without pause or even comprehension of the world around him. "_Cold stone. Can't breathe. The reek of taint. Blue eyes float above the blood. Is that Annlise's head? Maker, the light, they use it to play tricks, I can't—_oh. Oh, don't go searching for it. Don't go deeper. Why won't you look up—I'm up. I can help—"

Hulk bucked at him in a vain attempt to smash him into the nearest tree—transparency be damned—and nickered so gruffly, it could have been a swear had he spoke the common tongue. The movement jostled the man, but he gave no sound even with his agape mouth.

The witch settled Hulk with a scratch under his neck and went to the man. Without an inkling of gentleness, she grabbed a fist full of his hair and ripped at it to see how alive he truly was.

But, again, he made no sound nor flinch, mostly dead as he was.

Cole rustled and hovered over the mortal's ashen face. He groaned, "_How loud must I pray before I am heard?_ I hear you! Look up, not down, I can help, I…!" He is himself; the voice of a shattered boy—and then he is not himself; the voice of a despairing, frantic man. "_The demons' laugh when they bite. The Maker is with us! His Light shall be our banner, and we shall bear it—we shall bear it—the demon in her shape tries to kiss me, my knees are weak. I am weak. I want to—_"

"Cole. Enough." The witch cut in, her voice so sharp the consciousness winked in Cole's eyes and he was in this world again.

He blinked, beheld the lake, the lights, and her; then he frowned. "There was a hand I could have grabbed if he had just looked! Why? Why did you take me from him? I can't help him if I'm not in that hole."

The witch dropped the man's head and it fell slack against Hulk's flank.

"_I _cannot help him if you _are_."

The wounded mabari, head hanging low to her feet, gave a distressed whine at that.

This appeared to hurt the boy, or better yet frazzle him into a floating ball of air, his partially sheer hand grabbing at the flap of his hat and pulling it down over his face. He made a panicked squeak at her and shook his head, "But if I'm not there, then he will fall deeper and I won't be able to get him back! He is scared, demons have him without having him. He needs a hand to lead him back and I am that hand!" Out his hand came, futilely extended towards the bleeding human to snag him from his imaginary place, drag him from his demons, make him see what he needed to see.

The witch remained unmoved. She reached out and waved Cole's hand away into a moon-colored mist. "No," she said firmly, "not yet. His body is damaged. If you lead him back now, he will have nothing to return to but open wounds and grief—and it will be then that death will have him. Heal the body first, then his mind."

There was silence, no more of his shivery little breaths, as he peered at her and within her. River-blue eyes searching her for answers or thoughts, for a thread of emotion to twirl his finger around and pull loose into something greater. Agreement, truth, reassurance, even doubt—and he would cling to them like raindrops on a leaf, worried without them he would drop off and disappear.

But he knew better than to go searching in forbidden places.

The witch shielded her eyes and repeated herself, "_Body_ first."

Cole yanked his hat down further and seemed to waver in his frustration, phasing between this world and the next. Then, he slowly released his hat and nodded his head. "Yes…you're right. Body first—but…I still want to help."

The witch dropped her hand and peered out through him, between the forest's trees where the curious fireflies twinkled and eyes from the unseen curiously peeked in. "…He is mortal. No doubt he had things he lost. The fae will steal them if they are not gathered quickly and they will be impossible to get back," she said after a long, thoughtful hush.

"Yes!" Cole said and then again, with a firmness, "Yes, he had things, I can—I will go find them. They will comfort him—he can have his coin. This is good! This is very, very good!" He began to flicker more keenly. He drew himself out of his ball and swerved around the man's head, ghostly fingers threading through his matted hair.

"Good, good. Stay above, don't go deep, don't listen to them for long," Cole whispered to him and then he was floating off into the dark underwood with only his hat and his eyes still fully in this reality, an echoing '_good good good good_' trailing after him.

Hulk whickered and flapped his lips after he went, shaking his head of any wisps or small annoyances the boy might have left behind. The witch couldn't help but agree—now, at least the spirit wouldn't get in her way while she worked.

Combing her fingers through her hair repeatedly, the witch glanced down at the dog. Legs too weak to steady him any longer, the mabari had finally succumbed to his injuries and fallen down in a sprawling heap, whining pitifully in-between pants. Thick black blood oozed from his smoking gash, turning the soft, lush grass beneath him a bed of dying brown. The witch bent to a knee and scratched his jawline to rouse him.

"Hold on." She murmured and returned her attention to his companion.

He was faring no better. The tainted blood swelled from his mouth and stomach in a wave down Hulk's side, marring his coarse fur with rancid smoke and venom. It was superficial searing, she suspected, as the hart did not indicate any discomfort. She skimmed the pad of her forefinger over the surface just to make sure, pulling away when it bubbled and seethed hatefully at her.

Hulk barely batted an eye.

The witch wiped her finger on her skirt and said, "Once he is off you, go into the lake and clean yourself." She took a step back and raised both of her hands. With a long inhale through the nose, she gradually commanded the magic to once again lift the man. Tangles of shocking blue latched onto him as he floated from the animal and through the air, beckoned after her with each drag of her hands as though he was a puppet jerked on the strings of its master.

She began trekking backward towards the stairs, leaving in her wake a spotted path as the blood trickled off the man.

Seeing this, the mabari yelped and, trembling from head to toe, fought to stand once again.

"Stay where you are. I will come back for you," she called to him.

But the dog would not listen and followed clumsily after her, the sound of his paws racking desperately over the stones echoing through the tower.

The ascent was awkward and tight; the stairs coiling like a viper around a throat, depriving air and leaving behind a damp, earthy scent in its place. Up one step at a time, she steered the magic as best she could, shoulders and heads bumping narrowing walls, her concentration as strong as her fists clenched tight at her chest and the piercing gleam in her eyes. On the final step stood a doorway draped with a dark red curtain, heavy with dust and eaten ragged by moths. She threw it aside as she entered with the man jerked along after her, the magic a taut leash at his neck.

A single round room greeted them, cluttered from floor to ceiling with overflowing jars, bolted boxes, books, splintered staves, hanging dried meats, herbs and fruits, and creeping plants. At the furthest side of the room lay a bed by the broken roof, the high hole covered by another curtain to keep the chill out; a solitary tarnished gold cage hung above it.

The magic let go of its burden there, dumping the man with the same carelessness of tossing a sack of rocks to the wayside. He made neither noise nor flinch as his head hit the threadbare mattress, only that his mouth fell open as if making for a startled cry.

Snapping her fingers, three orbs came blinking into existence and bathed the room in a warm glow. The witch moved through the room in a flurry; ordering the hearth to 'ignite', scrambling to haul a grubby black bear's pelt out from under the bed, throwing down next to it a shoddily bounded book, its many pages slipping out. Then, she returned to the stairs and met the dog where he fainted, though he scratched his paws and bayed at her when she tried to touch him.

"Hush," the witch said, "You are useless dead."

Her fingers curled under the folds of his chin, rubbing soothing circles as her magic dripped out and sunk into his body. It raised him into the air, his weightless head still cradled in her hands as she half guided, half carried him up the rest of the way. As soon as his body met the pelt, the dog fell and sprawled out across it as if the soul had suddenly sprung from his body—and the witch had thought as much until she laid her hand upon him and felt the labored, fretting breath in his chest.

Alive. Enough to mend the soul back into place without Death to pull at the stitches.

She turned to the bed and wondered the same for the human—or if it was even worth the waste of herds.

She had seen his kind before—ravished in mind more than body, searching for a cure for the mind's ailment more righteous than a sword through one's own heart. What is more gallant than dying by a mighty lindworm? To bury sins in one of its bellies and be remembered as brave? The forest ate many of this sort before and she had come across their skulls, covered in moss and made into a hut for some tiny creature.

Cole never did understand the determination of mortal fools; if those who searched for their death desired it so, they would eventually find it. Not all the sweet-hearted spirits in the world could save them from that—and she was not in the business of dressing up the suicidal for last rites.

'_But this is your duty, halla'len'_, a voice whispered at the back of her head, _'what you were put here for'._

The witch tugged at one of her ears and frowned at herself—_Quiet_.

Shedding off cloak and bag, she crawled toward the man's side on her knees and cupped his slackening jaw. She squeezed it, slid her hand down and felt a fluttering pulse against her thumb. As she peered down at his gaunt face, she wrestled again with the temptation to simply end it. Just wrap her hand around his neck, choke the air before he wakes, save her time, and give him a kind death. There would be no deal-breaking in that, for she would do as she promised Cole and the dog. She would save him if only from himself.

'_But he is lost_'—the voice said again.

_No_, she answered, _he knew the path he took_.

But as those thoughts crossed her mind and her hand hovered over his throat, the man let out a terrible gasp. A death rattle took possession of his entire body, arching his back off the bed as if his life was suddenly being torn from his very bones. He shuddered about violent, coughing and hacking as his throat denied him the smallest sliver of air. The witch watched intrigued as he fought against himself—against the pain, against the acid destroying him, maybe even against _her_—a broken hand crawling at his throat.

He opened his mouth wide as if to release a scream or a defiant cry, but nothing came out.

Still, the witch had heard it.

An instinct to survive, as vain and insignificant as it was. It was enough to know her efforts wouldn't be for naught.

Sitting up on her knees, she slammed a hand down on his chest and the other on his throat to subdue him. Closing her eyes, the witch leaned over the man's face and softly exhaled a puff of air into his mouth. As she did so, a light spread from her shoulders to her outstretched hand, sinking past the tarnished armor and into his skin. With her mind's eye, she weaved the magic into his lungs and windpipe, imagining a needle and string patching the pieces closed. They sighed together, air passed from lip to lip, and as the magic healed, his lungs began to take what she offered.

A dying rasp became a gasp, and soon after he was breathing—fast and greedy in large gulps then gradually measured and careful.

When his body sagged under her, she took her mouth away and stood up. The witch loomed, waiting to see if he would let himself yield to the venom, but no more came from him.

As she moved her hands away, something on what was left of his armor caught her eye. The etched remnants of a golden insignia—she traced fingers along an all-seeing eye over a flaming sword, peering up at her as it cast its judgment. She frowned at it, covering it with the palm of her hand, her eyes flickering back to the man's face.

'_He is lost_', again the voice told her—and this time, the witch did not argue.

Turning on her heel, she rolled up her sleeves and went to wash her hands. A long night would be ahead for all of them.

* * *

Light between leaves.

Laughter from up ahead.

The blur of faces on the cusp of childhood and adulthood.

They grinned unabashed and poked fun of him about a girl. A village girl. A mage. The healer's apprentice. Black-haired, green-eyed, pockets full of medicine, feet light across the grass like a dancer in mid-performance. He was struck dumb by the dirt smeared on her freckled nose and her smile, her shining smile which stretched her cheeks every time she saw him. Their eyes met that morning, and he was cursing himself because his tongue had turned to butter and the words flowed sloppily out of his mouth.

The others saw and, oh, how they loved it.

'_Cully's got a crush!'_

'_Buggered that right up, didn't you?'_

'_Gonna walk into another wall so she heals ya?'_

'_Only way you'll get the balls to speak to her—hahaha!'_

They joked, and they jeered, and they rode out of his reach when he playfully tried to shove one back or smack another upside the head. Out of him comes a voice he had not heard in many years; eager but timid by nature, owned by a boy who fancied himself a man because he knew which end of the sword to hold.

First mission on their own; he was the leader, the eldest, the one trained the most severely. She had told him it was a simple mission—he remembered complaining (no, _whining_) it was too simple. They deserved more. _He_ deserved more. Trust him more, see what he can do.

Her strict hand jabbed towards the forest. '_Do as you are commanded, boy—do your duty and earn my faith'._

The obedient student he was, he bowed to her with the respect she was due and followed the strike of her finger. He took it seriously, as he did all his endeavors, but he was arrogant, possessing a youthful boldness he did not deserve.

It was nothing; he thought—a test and nothing more.

_Fool boy! What a foolish, idiotic, arrogant child he was!_

_All of them were!_

Beval. Farris. Annlise. Cullen.

Four squires entering a forest.

Four children playing knights in the dark, with wood for swords and cloth for armor.

Maker, by your design, what could they have known?

He was the voice at the back of his young head, peering through his young eyes and nagging at the young, carefree musing. He knew what would come just beyond the burned-red trees, charred by watchful shadows, but his cries went unheard. At best, his warnings were a simple anxious flip at the bottom of the boy's stomach, a fleeting thought without shape or form. Forgotten at a bird's chirp and the crack of a branch.

Still, he screamed on; praying, begging, pleading for those children to remember where they were—what evil surrounded them—and turn back.

Memories, however, are memories—they are not so easily coerced into changing for a few fallen tears.

Trapped behind eyes which were and yet were not his, he beheld the familiar route of thick, weedy ivy as high as the thigh, prickly vines grasping and stiff under boot. Past the hulking trees with sticky purple moss and golden lilies searching for the sun. Sweetest, densest green leaves with yellow at the edges blocked out the sun. Nevertheless, they found their way to the cabin.

It was black.

Black and unreal and godless.

Standing there as if cut from the Black City itself and patched into the fabric of their world. Had it not been for the quivering of a single flame at the window, he might have guessed it a trick—the fae playing a game with easily spooked children. The wind rustled and hit its wooden side as the door creaked open, somehow still pitched dark within.

They climbed off their horses and a man stepped out.

He grinned with yellow teeth marred by red in between—and then came the howls.

Demons ripping out from behind the man on all-fours, dragging out the darkness onto the foliage as ink from a chipped bottle leaked across a floor, dying everything a daunting emptiness. Mouths unhinged at the joint with rows of blade-thin teeth and twisting tongues as they spray salvia and wailing alike. And _giggle_. Maker, the giggling. He can never listen to wild, free giggling again; be it from a child, a baby, coy woman at his arm vying for his attention. A single sound and the desiccated, gaunt thing is descending upon him, gnarled claws fashioned around his neck.

They stole them easily. Overwhelmed them from every direction, tearing their limbs like unruly brats fighting over raggedy cotton dolls and who were they to care if the twine holding them together snapped in twain?

So much chaos in such a brief moment.

He swung his sword just to silence the noise, the giggling in his ear, blind to all but weeping madness, he would strike anything to exile it from his mind. Hot blood stung his eyes but still he battled on, feeling the dull thud of his blood splitting a bone but whose bone—demon, friend, himself—he could not distinguish.

He doesn't know why they chose him.

Luck, he sometimes muses. Certainly not because he was the bravest, nor the strongest, not because he was the last standing. Perhaps they just loved the way he squealed for his precious Maker when they hooked their fingers in his hair and wrenched him_ down_ onto his back.

There, into that forsaken hole.

Dug so deep into the earth where the light could not find him. The vile and the muck, the chewed entails of his companions floating on the surface. Congealed and reeking of decay as it covered his flesh. They tore his armor from him. His clothes. Left him bare against a wall of not dirt, but something living. Slimy and wet, convulsing under him like a lung desperate for a flitting breath, impossible to find purchase on and when he scratched to climb free, his nails came away with rancid meat caked underneath.

The demons would giggle as they watched.

Then, they would feast and he began to feel blessed that the sun could not see him, for what they did to him should never be seen by anyone—not man, not beast, not god. May his cries only be what reaches the surface, let not the Maker see his shame, but hear his pleads of penance instead.

Thus, he prayed with all his heart.

_Maker, my enemies are abundant.  
Many are those who rise up against me.  
But my faith sustains me; I shall not fear the legion,  
Should they set themselves against me._

He prayed when they played with him.

_I-n the long hours of the night  
When hope has—no! Stay away!  
—Has abandoned me,  
I will see the stars and know  
Your Light remains._

He prayed when they whispered to him.

…_I have heard the s-sound_

_A song in the stillness,  
The echo of Your—your voice…  
Maker, guide me—  
Haaa—Calling creation to wake from its slumber._

He prayed when they fed him.

_How…can we know You?  
I-In the turning of the…seasons  
in l-li…in…in life and…  
and…  
…death…_

He prayed until his voice became hoarse and feeble, his body stripped raw.

If the Maker could hear him, however, then He surely must have covered His ears and turned away, for the violation continued.

How long it went on, he could not even guess; time and sense were nothing there, dissolved as drops of water in a skin-cracking fog. How can he measure the minutes escaping by the strength of his legs or where he was falling when they finally failed him? All he understood was that his head might collide with the ground and in doing so, it might split, his brain splattered, and all would end.

_Please_ end.

Mercy, if such a thing lived in the Maker's heart, then please give this parting gift to him.

_Please, Andraste, in your name, I beg mercy._

Arms outstretched caught him in a soft embrace, pillowing his head on a warm breast and the timid rapping of a heart. Sliced out of the darkness he saw the shining raven hair and eyes the same green as sweet meadow grass and freckles across her nose. Her scent—what he had imagined could be her scent—of chamomile and honey watered his eyes with tears of relief.

No, he was not bewildered by beauty, not tricked by tender laughter.

The grinning face of a beautiful maiden bared down upon him but he knew at her back curled a tail like that of a leather scourge and bubbled boiled skin. As she put her forehead on his and tickled his nose with her hair, she was laying him upon the bones of his friends—but he could not gather the wherewithal to care. He was exhausted, his soul nearly untethered from his body, and when she kissed him, he knew no more would he invoke the name of his savior.

His mouth had been spoiled, his tongue too unholy to speak such sacred things.

_Mercy, give me mercy. Forsake me, take me, and give me this._

He was buried in that squalid bed of corpses, a thousand greedy hands guiding him farther down into that pitiless grave. By chance, he craned his head upward and his bloodshot eyes caught a small glimmer of light.

He cursed it—

—and yet, he yearned.

* * *

Mint, pomegranate leaves, heatherum, elfroot, gentian and vandal aria combined in a stew to null the pain. Theriac plaster on the wounds. Three jars of extracted venom, tiny drops of blood skimming the top, set aside on a high shelf for later use, for pure lindworm spit was a rare and valued thing. A poultice of elfroot, dragonthorn leaves, plant gum-juice, myrrh, dark embrium, prophet's laurel, silverite, and redmoss, for the stitching. And hours of screaming she could not block out, her ears throbbing when it was all said and done.

This is what it took to save a man and a dog from the brink of death.

By the time the dawn had come, it brought a sun which bloomed the same crimson that had dried on her hands and she was tired. So much so when Cole carried himself in on the yawning hush of the wind, she could barely be bothered by the clatter of objects or his breathy voice reciting nonsense phrases the birds had taught him.

Only when he hovered too close to the man, whose face had not returned from the bloodless mask of death, did the witch take him by the thin hand. "No. Not yet."

"But I cannot hear him. Where is his voice?" He held his hat in his hands and worried the brim.

"Resting."

"Do you not think when you rest?"

She laid her forehead on her knee, closed her eyes, combed her fingers through a strand of hair, and felt him sit (sit as well as anything made of compassion and old magic could) by her side. "Of course not. Mortals dream in places we are not welcome. Let him be; in the morning, you can have him—for now, watch."

Days would come and go by the waning and waxing of the moons; the man did not wake.

* * *

He healed, as bodies must do, but if he was aware of such things or the world at large, he gave no sign. He laid dead on the sheets, limbs stiff at the side like oak branches turned icy by winter's kiss, and solemnly did he make a noise—a single startled breath hissed through his clenched teeth and then, his head would roll to the side. But his skin was warm to the touch; his cheeks and lips flushed by blood. When the witch would come to change his bandages or his soiled sheets, there under her palm would be a steady _thump, thump, thump_.

It was often Cole came with his good intentions and what counted as a spirit's bleeding heart. He would take his place over the mortal's body, his dream-hazy form floating parallel above the bed. He peered into his closed eyes with his unblinking blue and hours upon hours they were silent and still.

What went on between them was not for the witch to know. At her worktable she stayed with her books and objects slathered in earth, singing ancient hymns of bygone eras, and rarely did she glance at the scene on the other side of the room. Even then, she was looking beyond them as she absentmindedly stimmed her fingers through her hair—through their transparent bodies, at the sky and the mountains and the curious forest observing from the brink of her realm.

Sometimes, the almost boy would take his leave without a word. For a split second, she would see his hands clenched to his chest, where his heart might be, his teeth cutting into his lips—in the next, there would only be a memory of him, left behind in the foggiest parts of her mind.

Other times her ears would ring from the harsh sob emanating from the boy. He would throw his head back, his hat flung off to the wayside, his face pinched in frustration.

"He won't listen!" He'd cry and his body would tremble between here and not, "_Rot and mud in my mouth. My legs will not lift me. Look up and there is no sky. When will I get out?—When?_ I am here! He sees my hands and spits at it! Why?!"

This, she did not answer, even when he turned his imploring sight upon her as if she understood or cared. Instead, she would bend down by the bedside and here she would offer his hat, muttering to only him, "Stop. This is what is real. Hold the hat now, Cole."

Again, he craned his head to see into her eyes, searching the depths of her soul for the answer to the fear that was not his own and which he had swallowed inside of him, let fester at the core of what he was. But the witch firmly spurned this, covered her eyes, and pushed his hat into his faded hands until the color returned to his fingers. She offered nothing else and Cole grew cold around her.

He would go then, and where he went off to in these short spells the witch did not ask. Best to leave spirits to their secrets, even kind ones—_especially_ kind ones.

As for the dog, his healing gave way far faster than his master's.

It took three days for him to open his eyes, another two for his strength to return enough for him to stand without aid. He ate ravenously when he was awake and slept as heavy as a bear in hibernation, his snore a quiet rumble she felt on her heels when she slipped close by.

It took some time for him to walk without great labor with a leg curled in a limp from the wound at his flank. He was no hapless puppy, however, and forced himself through it—day by day, his back grew straighter, his brown eyes alert once more, his head held higher when his attention was called. When he could, he would explore the tiny round room, if only to stop from pacing. Inquisitive and with some healthy scrutiny, he scoped for danger in her little boxes or under her worktable, blowing his nose at her when all he discovered was dusty grains and oddly smelling leaves. Occasionally, he would discover a dried piece of meat or a chunky gem to chew on, his head laying close to her feet as she worked.

Those were the better times.

The lonelier and more arduous came at night, when he paced and stood vigil over his human, nudged his hand with his nose, licked his fingers to stir him. If the dog could have cried, then his wail would have been so great even the cosmos above could not have ignored his grief. These were the moments the witch truly could not help him, as plainly as she felt the shudder of his sorrow; and still, when the dog's heart could take no more, it was she he would turn to.

Arms open, she would cradle the dog on her lap as best as she could and soothingly mutter nonsense words at him, her fingertips threading through his fur, lulling him to sleep as a mother with a weeping babe.

The morning would come and there the dog would be at the bed again, taking guard as Cole did his work. When it became too much and the dog would bite at his master's pillow, the witch would sink down beside him, one hand wrapped around his torso, the other hooked in his collar.

"Hold. He is fighting, da'len, and you must let him. If he dies now, it will be by his choice and no one else's."

Her words spirited the sound from the small room and left a cold, bone-deep ache in its place. The dog turned her grip, hiding his head in the crook of her neck and Cole washed-out like clouds drifting over the moons—for as much as he rebuffed her, even he knew this to be a simple truth.

But even as he was called and mourned for, the man would not open his eyes.

And the witch kept her distance, believing that he had made his decision.

* * *

The faces changed down there.

The head in the muck bobbed up and down—sometimes Farris' grey eyes, sometimes Cassandra's endless brown. He hit the wall and Rylen's cry rang in his ear. A demon's nails bit into his arm but when he looked, Mia's gold curls framed its ghastly face. It all mixed, then blends, contorted into a new torture to be harped upon him.

Images, images, images he cannot say.

Someone asked him once to elaborate but how do you describe such things? Are there words for it? Phrases? No, it is a feeling; only to be experienced and Cullen wished he could simply give it away and have it known.

But to have it known would be a sin. Have it known is to be tainted. He would rather die.

'_Don't!'_

Someone shouted for him from above—it reminded him of his father, then his brother, then a boy he did not recognize.

The tiny glimmer of light and a shadow hung over it. It moved. It reached out. From afar it offered a skinny hand.

'_I'm here!'_

A new fear plunged down upon his head. A panicked cry escaped him as he spurred from the fingers. His feet skid and he's falling again, deeper into the muddy dark, and above the voice moaned, _'No, please! Listen to me! I'm here to help!'_.

_Help?_

Cullen could have laughed. There is no help here.

There is nothing.

The glimmer of light vanished, and he was abandoned to the shadows again. Content to be there. Laid in his filth and thought himself better to become haggard and then a pile of chipped and graying bones.

"Weak." The callous crack of a familiar voice in his ear broke his solitude. "Is this all you can endure? I should have expected this."

He fought to keep his eyes shut, to let the numbness in his fingers and feet spread, but in the end, he flung them open and stared into the eyes fixed upon him. Pale blue, as harsh as the flawless sky on a cloudless day. How they awed him, frightened him, shredded him down into the small, insignificant whelp he always was.

"You were a waste of a name, boy. Too soft to do what must be done, too witless to listen, and where did it land you? _Pathetic_."

The words were sharp enough to kill, coated with poisoned hate as they impaled him as well as any spear. They were no lie, spoken perhaps not out loud but in every word, every look, every time he passed by her side and she scowled with a mouthful of resentment.

He could whisper, _yes it's true_, and feel his heart stop in the next moment.

Close his eyes and let her be right.

She is, after all, right. Has always been right.

Guiding lights can never be _wrong_.

…But.

A feeling stirred in his chest. It was distant, tiny sound—a gasping child, he thought. Or was it a stone in a rushing river to cling to? No, something else. A flaming heart which would not be quelled, his eyes forced wide by that defiant blaze. They came to him all at once; a myriad of sensations to wake him to a single, underlying pride locked in his heart so long ago:

He was not a _waste_. He was a _knight_—

—and he was not ready to _die_.

Bloodied and beaten and defiled, Cullen felt the urge to stand up, if only to tell her 'no'.

Or, maybe, it wasn't him at all but someone else. Someone who had survived all he had gone through and was stronger than he, cradling within them that determination which had seen them through a mangled black wood and a maw of a wild boar. The same which told him now to get to his feet, steel himself, and stare those pale blue eyes down.

_It's not your time. Not yet._

_Say it. Stand up and tell her. Tell them all._

_Tell yourself._

"Die, then; you are good for nothing else. Die. I command you."

The eyes matched him and under them he was reduced, a sniveling dog at his master's knee. His lips trembled around the words, afraid if he spoke, all this courage would vanish is a final, miserable cry.

But as he dared to open his mouth, a tiny voice echoed in his ear a mantra he had long forgotten.

_Be a lion!_

From the depths of him came a roar which called the light from that glimmer above and in it drowned the demons, the hole, the pale blue eyes and even himself.

Bathed in an ethereal brightness, only a single word was strong enough to exist—and it was his.

"_NO!"_

* * *

Life returned to him in a fever.

A scorch of memories across his eyes. Searing beyond them, to dark secret places protected deep in his skull, reopening those long hidden wounds and bleeding all his fears anew. It was this fear—black-red as blood born from a heart's last trickle—he knew first coming back to himself; not his past, not his face, not even his own name.

Fear, and with it the fervid stab of rage.

Cullen opened his eyes. He saw a hand reach out toward him and he took hold of it. Crushed it. Bent the fingers in the trap of his fist. Bright red blood pounded in his ears so loud, he couldn't hear the sound of his own snarl, shrill as shattering glass underfoot, as it tore through the quiet room.

"_NO!"_

There was a flash of violet under gray hair. A looming figure with pointed ears stiffened over him. It was an elf who spoke, her voice husky and impassive. "Release me." She wrestled her boney hand back, but he did not let go.

Glassy-eyed, his sense was still ensnared in the nightmare. Cullen clenched his jaw and hissed at her, "These tricks will not work, demon! You may have had the upper hand for a while, but I am myself now and I swear upon the Maker's Bride's own ashes I will fight—"

"I said _release me_."

It hit him faster than he could register. Thunder striking the air, stealing the warmth out of his space, as a tongue of lightning lashed out from elf's hands and bolted down his arm. He broke from her before the shock could reach his heart, a sensation of rolling white coursing through him from fingernail to shoulder. The shout in his throat struck mute, his open mouth filled with saliva tasting of copper and vibrating metal.

"I do not like to be touched," said the elf. She stepped back from him as if she had done nothing, hand clawed and laced with dancing embers.

_Magic_. Cullen realized with measured revulsion. Awareness stirred inside him and he cradled his twitching hand, blinking with clarity. He was alive. Somehow. He saw a dark room, violet-blue in the cast of the nearing night. Not a hole, this was real. Wood and cloth beneath his legs and a warm breeze from the open window at his sweating back.

And the elf—she was—

"_Mage_," he growled lowly and leveled a cagey glare at her. Speaking felt rusted, each word hard scraping his vocal cords and guttural when uttered, "where am I? What is this place?"

The elf stood motionless and flicked the last of her magic away with the curling and uncurling of her fingers. In the shadows he could not see her face, her messy hair tousled over it; he saw only the vague outline of a thin mouth.

"You are within my realm and have been for some time." She bent to pick up a wooden bucket. It sloshed water as she walked away and lifted it onto a table. In the glint of the ascending moon, he saw soaked cloth draped over the rim; it was stained with scarlet blots.

He held his hand tighter to his chest. The magic waned, but still, the muscles spasmed. He ignored it, as he ignored the bashing on his temples, "…and what are you?"

Back to him, she raised a fist over her head and squeezed it. Slowly she unfurled her fingers and from her palm floated an orb of light, soft and round as a ball of fluff. It lit the room with a dim glow; enough to see the elf as more than a hunched shape.

"I am a witch."

She stated it as plainly as a name, as easy as a day of birth. Not as the ill brand it was.

A wave of dread and then something worse racked down Cullen's spine, and it chilled him, wound and whirled in his stomach in a bundle of pain. He bowed to it, wanted to retch it out, but he swallowed the bile and tried to sit up straight, regain a bit of pride.

"Witch…a witch of the woods," he breathed, shaking his head in disdain, "am I to expect you cared for me out of good will?"

There was a humor in that, however black it was. Witches doing good deeds without a price, without trick under sleeve, it was laughable. Jim's voice from the other—_day?_—before drifted into his thoughts; witches wearing rabbit skins, eating eyes like grapes, bathing in maiden blood. Was he one of the men to seduce, spirit into their nightly world for no one to find save for a bloody spot on the ground? He wished she would lie to him, proclaiming that she was a kindly old white witch—the only one for miles—so he may laugh bitingly at her face. Watch it crumble into black hatred when he did not fall prey to her wiles.

The witch didn't rise to him though. She moved, wordless, in her low light. Somehow this was worse. He panicked as the silence crept on, his flesh somehow not his own as it turned hot, then cold and clammy and ridden with goosebumps. He was not well. At least, not enough to defend himself should the witch decide now was the time. When she turned, he thought she might do just that and he recoiled as far his body would let him, like an animal cornered in a cave, prepared to die if it meant tearing out a jugular with his quaking hands.

As she came near, she held something out to him. A cracked cup, steaming.

"What…what is that?" He asked.

It had an overpowering stench of sludge during a thunderstorm; it made him sick.

"Medicine. Drink this, yes? Yes, now."

Cullen eyed it dubiously and pushed it away. "And have it poison me? Turn me a slave to your bidding? No, get that away. I will not drink what I do not know."

The witch did not budge, "if I were to poison you, you would have never woken," again, she urged the cup forward and, when he dodged it once more, she tried to put the rim to his lips herself. The steam stung in his nose. Cullen clamped his mouth shut and turned his face away.

She clicked her tongue at him, "Stop this. You are still unwell. Very much so. You _must _drink."

"N-no!" He bit out and glared at her with feeble malice—all he could muster as his body seemed to throb like one large blood vessel ready to burst. It hurt; everything _hurt_. It stirred him to the near hysteria, unable to hold back the frenzied thoughts that poured from his lips, "I know your kind. You want me living, capable—taking joy as I walk right into another trap. What's in it, hm? Yew? I will not have it—I will not be—" Another bashing sensation in his skull. Cullen winced and cradled his head as he grounded out between gritted teeth, "—ugh, coaxed into an oven to be devoured—!"

"_I have no oven_." The witch interrupted and there was something akin to exasperation in her otherwise detached tone, "You whine as if you were a child. Must I soothe you like one?"

"You _mock_ me—"

"_Silence_," ordered the witch at once, the gleam of fangs hinting just under her lips. "Drink your tea or die if you must, but be _silent_."

And struck silent he was, for the witch had a power within her that curdled his blood and paralyzed him so. He could not question it, could not name what it was, but he stared and prayed that she would not move, not bend her head and meet his eye with her own—and when she did, extending her arm toward him, Cullen cringed and prepared himself for what he might see.

But she went past him and placed the cup on the windowsill. A choice, if he were to be that difficult. Only that.

"You are very rude," she stepped back, her fists clasped in her frayed skirts, and Cullen could feel the weight of her stare crash onto him as stones from a mountaintop, "You have been tended to as a guest in my home only by the wish of others and your own refusal to die. Do not disrespect my hospitality, mortal. _Do not_. I have broken bargains for lesser insults, no matter how strong the loyalty behind them was."

For several daft heartbeats, the noise had gone from the room and Cullen dared not speak.

Then, he croaked, " …the others…?"

Memories rushed together: the lindworm, the blood, the last glimpse of his comrades' aghast faces before he was descending into violent, dark water. _Cassandra, Jim, Rylen_—did they—? No, no, they couldn't have. He went too far down, too deep to follow. There's no way any of them—

"I speak of your hound," the witch replied.

"Dane?" Culled gasped as he suddenly sat up, his eyes alight with newfound hope. Dane, his Dane was alive—somehow, someway, not dead at the bottom of the lindworm's belly. He searched around him, both anxious and yet eager to what had become of his beloved mabari, but there was no lump resting in the shadows, no corner he had not missed. "Where is he?"

The witch gestured to the window, "I sent him out. He walks, and he is safe. Very safe."

"But where…?"

The witch did not answer and instead, she turned her back to him, walking across the room to do Maker knows what. The shadows born in the orb's light concealed such things from him—he heard objects clink, pages being flipped, cracks of wood and rustling plants—and she was faceless, a hunched, haggard shape outstretched across the wall.

If he peered too closely, his vision would dizzy and spin, turn that shadow into something monstrous and impossible. A beast disgorging blackness, like a giggling, grinning demo—_no_, it was a trick his mind.

They weren't _here_.

Dane was, _somewhere_. He needed to find him and see for himself; but as he thought of moving, the room swayed under him and kept him glued to the bed.

Cullen inhaled sharply and closed his strained eyes tight, the fever wrecked through his body. He tried pressing his palms to his eyes, push the fever out as nonsensical as that was, but there was no relief in this. Nor was there in placing his burning forehead to the cooling stones of the wall.

There had to be something—anything. A taste, a color, a sound.

_A song._

Cold sweat broke along the curve of his spine. He swallowed thickly but his mouth was dry and his limbs were growing heavy as iron chains, his body awake to the carving. He clenched his fist until blunt nails cut skin, swearing he could hear the raising blood cry out.

_Do not think of it. Ignore it. I don't need it. I need—I need—_

Cullen cracked an eye open and there he saw the tea waiting for him. The liquid inside swam like green moss from the marsh. 'Medicine', she had claimed. Perhaps it was. Perhaps it would kill him. Either way, there might be a comfort to be found—or so he reasoned as a tremor overtook his body, his hands unsteady when they held the cup. He threw his head back and drained it quickly before his stomach could lurch and have him gagging. It tasted like what you would expect from the underbelly of a long decomposing tree trunk; slimy as mud down the throat and into his gut— but also woody?

_How_ was it woody?

He bit down on something hard and pointy, ashy on his tongue as he stuck it out. To his bewilderment, he picked out several slivers of gray wood.

_Of course_—he didn't know what else he was expecting. Count his blessings it was not a frog's tongue or something just as ghastly for flavor.

Cullen spat the bits back into the cup and dragged out a long, rough breath. The pain didn't subside. He lifted a hand and noted the fading bruises blotting his skin, saw how his fingers still quivered. He couldn't distinguish if it was his eyes or the shakes, didn't understand that it might be both.

All he knew that nothing was changing—not fast enough or not at all. There was still the pinching between his eyes; the nagging, thirsting nerves. His insides moaning for a single line of that wonderful melody. Just a drop. A shot in the arm.

No, not now. He couldn't—he didn't have it—

—_but he needed he needed he needed he needed_—

A bag, linen-bound and tightly bundled, fell upon Cullen's legs without warning, shocking him right out of his maddened thoughts. He glimpsed up and found that the gray-haired witch had returned without making a sound, her presence near him as seamless as moonlight falling on the skin.

"Here," she drawled, pointing at the bag as he gawked dumbly between the two, "These are your things. We gathered what we could."

"My…?" He mouthed and then it hit him.

_Lyrium. _

Cullen loosened his grip on the sheets, unaware he had been clenching at them for some semblance of control, and dove for the bag. The knot came undone with a rough tug and out upon his lap spilled the contents of what once might have been his traveling pack. The pathetic remnants of his sword, blade inhumanly bitten off at the hilt. The corroded scraps of his breastplate; iron splotted sea-foam green and shedding flakes of rust. A slender knife with a chipped edge. A leather pouch that—if he had been of the mind to notice—was still heavy with sovereigns and then a second, smaller pouch, tied closed by a gold strong. He paused in his frenzy to feel it out, his fingers tracing over the shape of a tiny circle inside.

He pushed them all aside as he tore through the bag, his heart hammering hard enough in his throat he could taste his own heartbeat on the back of his tongue. "Where? Where? Where is it? It cannot be all there is—There has to be—Ah!"

Out tumbled a wooden, intricately carved box.

A relieved smile spread across his face as he picked it up.

But, something was wrong. The box was cracked, the latches missing and the lid only attached by the grace of the last remaining hinge. It was light. _Too_ light.

Cullen's face crumbled as he opened the box and found it empty, the indents of where the vials once had been a slap in the face. "No…" He whispered as panic weeded into his bones, "No. No. No—Maker—no."

He turned it over and shook it, believing his eyes had played a trick on him. That in the dim light, he had just missed a vial. But nothing fell and Cullen—_Cullen_ could feel himself coming undone by the cut of his last thread.

He was going to die in silence.

He gulped what could be hysterical cry and looked at his box again. "What—what happened?"

A light sparked overhead as the witch called a new orb into existence. She tilted her head at him and said, "it was found like that. Everything inside was broken, yes? Yes. So, I wiped it clean."

"You—!" Cullen's eyes flared as he yelled at her, sudden outrage replacing the terror, "I could have used that! Now I have nothing! No, I have to—damn it! DAMN IT FUCKING ALL!"

He threw the box as hard as he could and he hoped that it hit her—made her bleed, made her cry, hurt her like _he_ was hurting—but his aim was off. It smashed into the floor inches from her feet.

The witch didn't even flinch.

It was enough to reduce Cullen to tears. He let out a deep, wretched sob which cracked him down to the fragile core and bent his throbbing head down between his knees, hands knotted in his hair, dull nails dug in his scalp. His blood screamed and there was nothing he could do for it.

The witch cupped a hand over her ears, "You are too loud." She tsked, pushing the scraps of the box with a toe, "I do not understand. Starlight can be gotten again."

Cullen threw his head up and roared, "You stupid hag! I require lyrium, not some blasted, mythical nonsense!"

He could kill her. He wanted to. Strangle the air from her. Anything to shut up that inane, emotionless voice of hers—

"Starlight _is_ lyrium."

Cullen blinked, startled tears falling free, and stared at her. "…what?"

The witch wasn't looking at him. She was staring at the ground, tugging at her ear to pull the painful shrill of his cry out of her. "Lyrium is what the stone children—no—the dwarves call it, yes? Yes. From veins of the Fade, they get it; it is its blood. We of the forest take the Fade's tears and call it Starlight, for that is where it falls from."

Cullen's mouth flopped open and close much as a beached fish did, scarcely able to believe what he was hearing, much less thread a sentence together. If he was well, he would question it. An unregulated source of lyrium hidden away in the forest, used as an unlimited power the strange folk? It sounded like a fairytale—it sounded _dangerous_—it sounded too good to be true.

But Cullen wasn't well—he was spiraling, and it was more his starving blood than he who asked, "Is it..the same?"

"No, yours is diluted and weak, ours is pure. Untamed."

"And… and you can make it?" He urged on, "Can you make this 'Starlight'?"

The witch didn't answer at once. She studied Cullen before answering slowly, "… Yes… but it will require payment."

Cullen heaved a sigh that rattled like chimes on the wind, "Do it, whatever the price—"

She cut him off with a single motion of her hand, "Did you not understand? It is stronger and you are mortal—magicless besides. It could kill you."

"I… I don't care!" He scrambled for his things and found his coin purse, shoving it more than offering it to her. "Look, see, you can take as much as you wish. It's all yours."

But the bag might as well have been stuffed with dirt, for the witch shook her head and said, "Your mortal coin is useless to me."

"Then what—"

"A boon of magic requires an exchange of equal worth. I ask for what is as close to your heart as a draught of Starlight and to be given it of your own free will; anything else is of little importance to me."

_Equal exchange_—he thought in frustration, the strength going through him_—it was never easy with this sort._

He should have guessed she would say something like that. This was how witches worked, with their damned whimsical nonsense, not taking what was physical and within reason. He recalled the traveling folk in Haven's square bartering spells of love and luck for animal bones, strings tied to trees, riddles, and dreams. He scoffed at them then, thinking what fools could be tricked so easily, how could they even dare to trust what they could not see, not touch.

The irony of this did not escape him now as he pondered what he could give.

The witch had gone to her knees and gathered her skirt to pick up his mess, assuredly thinking this was the end of that. Perhaps she was right, for what could a human have that a witch would want?

All he had was coin, what was left of his sword, and himself.

Nothing else of value.

The hope ebbed, and the shakes became stronger, and he would have buckled to it all if not for this thought.

_A name._

_That is what he had._

Cullen licked his lips and closed his eyes and spoke as if he was making a wish on a star.

"Cullen Stanton Rutherford."

A good name—the last untainted thing he had in his heart.

The witch went still. She stared at him suddenly as if she was truly seeing him in for the first time and what she saw, she did not like. For now, she knew for certain she was dealing with the worst kind of mortal: a desperate one with nothing left to lose—never should she have brought him to her home.

Her lips parted, the air passing through in a startled hiss, "...what did you say?"

"My full, true name," he answered and found he had the strength to slip his legs off the bed and left his chin high, so he might not cower in this bargain, "Cullen Stanton Rutherford. That's good enough payment for you, isn't it?"

The witch rose slowly from the ground, wood scattering at her feet and forgotten as she stepped over them. She pushed her hair out of her face and for the first time, Cullen saw she was no ancient creature, lined and weathered and crazed by the pitfalls of time, but an elf as young as he with a sharp face and a large nose. Beautiful, rippling, unreal as the full moon on the water's surface, where the promise of holding it might tempt you to drown as it spilled through your fingers.

She regarded him with her empty violet eyes, irises edged in deathly black, and asked, "Do you know what you have offered, mortal man?"

He held them with his own; whiskey brown awashed fire-bright either by certainty or lunacy, "…yes."

"Are you consenting?"

"Yes."

Her eyes narrowed, her face unreadable, and then she was turning away, no mention of a blood agreement or binding handshake tied by an arcane curse. "The deal is sealed. Stay, I will return," she declared as she went across the room and took something from the table. Then she was gone, vanishing down the staircase with only a trail of silvery hair to show where she once was.

Cullen did not heed her and stay obedient in that bed, however. Not when he could not see what she was to do.

As soon as he saw the flicker of her outside the window, he was rising, concealed in nothing but bandages and yellowed bruises. His vision blurred as he staggered on clumsily, light-headed and weak-kneed, taking one uneven step after another until he was bounding down that skeleton of a staircase; hands and shoulders smacking walls to keep himself upright. Protesting pangs went up and down his limbs as his foot touched the grass at last and he walked from the doorway to the outside, uneasy hand on gripped on the ruined stone.

Then, he stopped and stood in awe of a realm which seemed to have been frozen in the gentle blue glow of fireflies and twinkling lights, in the pulsing flowers and the ripples of the lake, bouncing off the trees and even the grass, like reflections off a broken mirror. He swore, as a soft breeze flew by and these lights shimmered and drifted and danced, it was not his world he was gazing upon, but the glittering dust from galaxies above—and if he took a step beyond this threshold of magic and forbidden, he would walk among these constellations, faraway suns under his feet, with nothing to hold him to the world he knew. He would fly, lost in the crossroads of thousands of midnights, and there would be no turning back for him, no door to escape through, for he went where he did not belong and it had eaten him whole.

Thus, Cullen stayed and watched with his breath caught in his throat as the witch stepped upon the lake which shone as bright as moonshine and looked up at the sky. To the water she put a vial and filled it halfway; shook it to the heavens as if beckoning something, her fingers twinged with ice to frost the glass. She raised her hands above her head and weaved them through the air as a spider weaved its legs through cobwebs-spinning her wrists, twitching her fingers, seamless and practiced as a nightly ritual.

Then he saw tangles of light as thin as strings, as light as cotton, wrapped around her fingers and she was using them to call the stars down upon her. Dozens of tiny gems falling to her palm, shaken from the blanket of the night. She held these stars as careless as holding a handful of marbles and crushed them until her knuckles turned white.

Have you ever heard a star break?

It was beautiful, and it was heart-wrenching. A living creature crying out suddenly, happy to finally experience the wonder of death.

The witch crushed her fist until it dripped with opalescent lifeblood. Bit by bit, she dropped the pieces into the vial where they hissed in the water, the burn of living stars sizzling out, everything melting together as she blew a plume of frost into the bottle. She swirled the bottle in circles, the remains of the stars tinking against the glass until they dissolved into waves of blue and stunning tiny shards.

And there it was; lyrium made with the tears of the Fade, the light which wove the stars into the sky.

It seemed too good to be real and as the witch walked from the water's surface, not even the soles of her feet damp, her body patched between the light and shadows of the moon, Cullen wasn't sure if he ever woke from his slumber. That she and the bottle in hand was a dream—or a nightmare that had yet to seize him.

Either way, Cullen took a stumbling step back as the witch strode toward him, her dead-eyes somehow blacker in the glow. "Here. Drink," she said, shoving the vial into his chest.

Frozen, wisping snow-white smoke which chilled his flesh rose from the rim, yet the bottle was hot to the touch. Cautiously, he took hold of it and furrowed his brow at her, "I-I can't, I'm not a mage—I have to inject it."

"Not Starlight. It will kill you. Drink it."

Cullen regarded her with an incredulous frown but he held the bottle high and, once he spotted no danger in the liquid, he drank from the draught. The Maker's song broke out from the river of his veins and he gasped, feeling within the very fiber of him the lyrics and melodies he had known from childhood, born anew and clearer than he ever heard before. He gasped and from his breath burst the stars from above, flashing like embers from his lips. The shakes subsided, the pain disappeared, and no longer did he need a hand on the wall to steady him.

It was not just the song in him which had been renewed, but himself. He felt bright and brand new, the sun on the horizon of the new day, golden and without flaw. It was as if he had never known pain and never again would he.

All this from one sip and he pulled back from the vial suddenly, the very dust of those stars dazzling his eyes, "Shit. This is...this is amazing. I—I haven't ever felt like—" his words were tongue-tied, the delirium turning his mouth to mash. He rubbed his eyes until he could focus on the witch who—though his everything had shifted at that moment—had remained as detached as before. This, for some reason, infuriated Cullen.

Still, he was nothing if not grateful and so he said with an incline of his head, "Thank you."

However, the witch twirled a curling hair around her finger and replied tersely, "I do not need your thanks. You give it too quickly for what you have traded for it."

Cullen huffed, irked, and perhaps in the lyrium's high, he dared to roll his eyes at her, "It is a name. As good as any word in this word."

"Foolish."

"Am I, mad creature?" He wanted to laugh, "This from you of all wretched things."

For this, she shifted her eyes to his face and twisted her mouth as if tasting something sour, "Yes. Arrogant and irrational. Yes, very. You give without thought."

This time, he laughed; eyes and mouth fogged by stars and lyrium, he let out a bark that startled the fireflies and sent them into hiding in the hollows of the trees. "What must I think? That you will whisper it into my dreams at night and drive me into a raving lunatic like the rest of the demons who resign there? You can do no better with your illusions, witch. I dare you to try." And that, truly, was the stupid man in him who leaned in close to the witch's face and smirked at her as if she was powerless. For what had he to fear at this moment, with the sun in his chest, the Maker's voice swimming in his veins and his name in the devil's hand?

Nothing—and then, the witch did not flinch in the cast of his shadow and said, "Mortal Fool. Let me show you what you have given, then."

Her hand moved to his ear and in one fluid movement, she snapped and Cullen's mind, body, his very will, all that his name had ever meant was no longer his to own:

"Go back to the bed, _Cullen Stanton Rutherford_, and rest until the sun rises high and touches your face."

Something struck, and he moved, wide-eyed and empty.

Meek and transfixed, he went up those winding stairs and laid himself onto the bed without a word, a thought, or even a breath—and he slept, not himself until the sun rose and touched his face.


End file.
